Graduate Writing is (Not) Basic Writing
Graduate Writing is (Not) Basic Writing
Missy Watson
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ABSTRACT: 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, 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 teachers and administrators may want to consider when developing and teaching similar courses.
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As college campuses have enrolled communities of adult learners over the past several decades, undergraduates have not been the only student populations whose backgrounds are increasingly diverse. Consider the linguistic and cultural differences in US graduate programs where over 390,000 international students are enrolled, as was the case in the 2016-2017 school year (Institute of International Education). These statistics, however, only scratch the surface since they do not include the educational, cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds of domestic graduate students. Alongside this diversification of graduates, research on graduate writing and writers has slowly emerged, focusing especially on English language learners (ELLs) and the politics of writing theses, dissertations, and research articles. While research in Basic Writing has not yet ventured to stake a claim in studying graduate-level writing, research in Composition Studies on this topic has increased over the last several years (e.g., Autry and Carter; Douglas; Habib, Haan, and Mallett; Jordan and Kedrowicz; Micciche; Simpson; Simpson et al.; Sundstrom). Meanwhile, scholars working out of English for Academic/Specific purposes1 (e.g., Allison; Charles; Lee and Swales; Richards; Swales Research Genres; Swales and Feak; Swales and Luebs) and Second Language Writing (e.g., Belcher “The Apprenticeship”; Casanave and Li; Flowerdew; Frodeson; Li; Norris and Tardy; Silva, Reichelt, and Lax-Farr) have researched ELL graduate-level writing courses for decades. This growing scholarship provides a rich body of pedagogical and administrative insights about why and how writing courses for graduate students can and should be designed and taught.2
While scholarly attention to graduate writing has been paid, offering writing courses for graduate students remains far from the norm. Though on the rise, graduate-level writing courses subsist in much smaller numbers on a national level as compared to undergraduate writing courses, and many institutions do not offer them (see Caplan and Cox for their survey results on the state of graduate writing support in the US and beyond). Instead, graduate students are typically expected to master writing by way of traditional mentorship with faculty advisors, the students’ own undertakings, or osmosis. But given the diverse backgrounds and experiences of all student bodies in the US and beyond, we cannot and should not assume graduate students will enter their programs with the same level and experience with writing. And, even if we could assume that all graduate students enter with a level playing field when it comes to writing, it is beside the point. As Laura R. Micciche and Allison D. Carr argue, “Because students do not typically arrive in graduate programs knowing the significance of genre and discourse features specific to an area of study, we do them a disservice when we fail to provide formal study of the intellectual, rhetorical work required to write for specialized contexts and purposes” (494). In the same vein, Daveena Tauber claims that the lack of explicit instruction in graduate writing especially hinders groups already disadvantaged, including “students for whom graduate school is not a full-time immersion experience; students in relatively short degree programs; returning students; students in distance education; and those coming out of educationally underserved communities” (640).
Graduate students may not enter their programs as “strangers in academia” (Zamel), at least to the extent that their undergraduate counterparts do, but they certainly remain strangers to the sorts of insider discursive knowledge and practices that are central to graduate writing. Without explicit, basic instruction in writing, we up the risk 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. In this way, graduate writing, like undergraduate basic writing, would benefit from the voices of scholars like those in Basic Writing and Adult Education who have long advocated for underserved and so-called “nontraditional” students and who have continuously defended against notions of ‘basic” and “nontraditional” writers being uneducable or unfit for higher education.
But can and should we liken graduate writing to basic writing? If we consider basic writing to mean remedial or simple writing, as is still commonplace in higher education at large, then the answer is most definitely no. It is not farfetched, though, to assume that this is indeed the way that explicit writing instruction at the graduate level is interpreted. That said, as Bruce Horner calls us to do, we can and should recover the ideological marginalization of “basic” in basic writing, recognizing the term instead as referring to “leading edge work addressing the most fundamental questions about literacy and learning” (9). Indeed, as Horner sees it “the word ‘basic’ does not represent ‘simple’ but, rather, fundamental and profound, the site for open inquiry, as in the ‘basic’ research in which scientists engage” (9). If we understand “basic” in this way, then, yes, graduate writing, as a discursive practice introduced to newcomers, is basic writing. And it stands to serve all graduate students, no matter their educational, cultural, racial, and linguistic, background, including first-language English writers.
On the one hand, the development of graduate-level writing courses serves as a more ideal response to increased cultural and linguistic diversity in adult graduate populations—one that resists the myth that graduate students do not need, want, or merit explicit writing instruction. Such courses counter, at least partially, the problematic assumption that graduate students will acquire on their own or through traditional methods the new literacy, discursive, and rhetorical practices they need to survive and thrive in their graduate studies. On the other hand, those who are familiar with the history and scholarship in Basic Writing will also (rightly) presume that these courses and their students are too often still deemed remedial. We can see in the literature on graduate-level writing the same sorts of political dilemmas we are well accustomed to dealing with in Basic Writing, including problems with these courses bearing little or no credit (even when they are required and their curricula are rigorous), the gatekeeping roles typically served by these courses, and the lack of professional development support available to teachers. In addition, most teachers of these courses are underpaid adjuncts or graduate students themselves who may or may not have been trained to work with interdisciplinary adult graduate students, ELLs, or international students.
Furthermore, the challenges facing administrators hoping to enact writing resources for graduate students are many. Most writing programs in US higher education are already underfunded and understaffed; taking on the additional task of establishing new programs, courses, and other supports for graduate students may, thus, appear daunting if not impossible. Like other writing instruction that has historically been assumed to be remedial, graduate writing instruction must overcome various harmful ideologies that actively work against efforts to systematically support and sustain writing resources for those termed underserved, underprepared, and nontraditional students, including and especially people of color and multilingual students. However, it is these student populations who are most likely to seek out such courses, in addition to those so-called mainstream, prepared, or traditional students who also stand to benefit from additional writing instruction. Unfortunately, changes in student demographics and needs do not necessarily result in redefined expectations and pedagogical approaches in higher education. Instead, these expectations may place the burden on students who are considered deficient and in need of being remediated. Even when such a course becomes institutionalized, the issue of how to best teach the adult writers who enroll may be a considerable challenge, given the great diversity of their backgrounds. They may differ drastically in their educational, disciplinary, language, and class backgrounds, their interests, needs, and goals, as well as their age, nationality, culture, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and, of course, abilities, to name only some of the variables. There is a lot of ideological and pedagogical baggage with which a basic writing administrator interested in implementing graduate-level writing courses must contend.
And I can attest to the struggle firsthand. In 2011-2012, I designed, administered, and taught a graduate-level writing course designated for English language learners (ELLs) at a private university in the Northeast. I faced an array of challenges with curriculum design, course logistics, enrollment, institutional buy-in, and, ultimately, sustainability. Since the course was cancelled after just two years, there are important factors that contributed to this unfortunate result worth interrogating. My goal is to share and critically consider the political dynamics impacting the fate of this course and to identify strategies that may lead to better outcomes when similar administrative endeavors are undertaken. As these courses become more regularly offered across higher education institutions, and I believe that they will and should be, Basic Writing experts may find themselves spearheading such initiatives and will want to draw on their disciplinary expertise as well as that of neighboring areas of inquiry in Adult Education, English for Academic/Specific Purposes, Second Language Writing, and Composition Studies (especially Rhetorical Genre Studies).
Adult writers from all backgrounds stand to benefit from explicit instruction in writing; that said, much of the research focused on here deals explicitly with graduate writers who are English language learners. This is both a pragmatic and political decision. For one, my own teaching of graduate-level writing that I describe herein focuses on ELL student populations. And, furthermore, the majority of research on graduate-level writing instruction is focused on ELLs. But more than that, I wish to emphasize that all writing courses should be designed in ways that make them accessible to all students, no matter their language differences. When we as educators start with multilingualism and treat language diversity as the norm, we are better equipped to effectively reach and support a wider range of adult writers. Therefore, although many of the courses I refer to (when invoking scholarship) are created specifically for ELL students, they would nevertheless serve as useful models for designing similar courses for so-called mainstream or English monolingual student populations, when and if such linguistic homogeneity ever exists.3
In the section that follows, I put into conversation some of the research on graduate-level writing courses with Basic Writing and Adult Education because I believe that research across these three areas overlap and complement each other in valuable ways. Truly, the intersections of Basic Writing and Adult Education scholarship can serve as important frameworks for interpreting and complicating trends in scholarship on graduate-level writing courses. This is primarily because Basic Writing, more than any other enclave of scholarship, focuses on “othered” student groups, while Adult Education, more than any other enclave of scholarship, focuses on the values and challenges of teaching in classrooms where the adult students may be radically different in their backgrounds, identities, constraints, needs, motivations, and much more.
Furthermore, both camps of scholarship are intent on addressing copiously the politics of language and teaching, an angle that I believe is necessary for (but not always present within) the study of graduate writing. Next, after tracing connections between research on graduate writing courses and scholarship in Basic Writing and Adult Education, I extend this interdisciplinary conversation by analyzing the institutional politics I faced to gain support for and keep afloat the graduate course I developed. To conclude, I outline some of the administrative concerns basic writing administrators may want to consider when developing similar courses.
Graduate Writing, Writers, and Writing Courses
I anticipate that many readers of BWe are already familiar with working with domestic and international graduate students, especially those who are ELLs, since these students sometimes enroll in undergraduate writing courses or visit writing centers. The lack of writing resources for graduate ELLs has left many students no choice but to enroll in courses designed for undergraduate students where the content and approaches—while well intentioned and productive for certain graduate students and to a certain degree—may be irrelevant given the demands of graduate-level disciplinary writing and the specific needs and goals of graduate adult learners. Graduate ELL writers are sometimes required to take these courses (by their advisors, departments, or institutions), which sometimes do not count toward their advanced degrees even as electives, take precious time away from their disciplinary studies, and no doubt leave many feeling frustrated if not resentful (Frodesen). Faculty may agree that their graduate students, ELL or otherwise, need to further develop their disciplinary writing in English, though many do not believe it is their responsibility or “job” to provide that support (Cooley & Lewkowicz; Jordan and Kedrowicz). Meanwhile, more explicit instruction in English and writing is increasingly sought and desired (see some examples in Watson).
Like their native speaking peers, those graduate students who are ELLs engage in different and more advanced writing situations as compared to undergraduate students. Further, since the requirements and assessment of graduate student writing, that of ELLs, or otherwise, often act as gatekeeping mechanisms for graduation, job entrance, promotion, and professional development, the stakes are serious (i.e., through the writing of theses, dissertations, job application or promotion materials, manuscripts for academic publication, grant proposals, etc.). All writers face challenges, but there are distinct obstacles facing graduate ELLs that are worth acknowledging. For instance, since internationalization of higher education has led to the increased recruitment and enrollment of international graduate students, some of whom arrive to the US are writing in English for the first time outside of completing language proficiency exams such as the TOEFL4 (Dong). Faculty guidance no doubt plays a major part for all graduate students; however, it may have a greater impact on graduate ELLs and their disciplinary enculturation since these students often find themselves more isolated, having or seeking fewer opportunities to develop their English and disciplinary literacies elsewhere (Dong). Further, if mentorship relationships are steeped with assumptions that writing is a universal or “common sense” skill for graduate students, as Doreen Starke-Meyerring explains, students may be negatively affected in numerous ways. For instance, such assumptions, says Starke-Meyerring, can work to stifle learning, position students in unsupportive “sink or swim” situations, discourage questions and dialog about the writing process, and lead students to internalize their struggles as their own failures rather than that of pedagogy, faculty, programs, and institutions.
While supporting students who work across the disciplines is common and likely more manageable in writing courses at the undergraduate level, graduate writing typically demands more disciplinary-specific approaches to writing and may present challenges since writing instructors are often not experts in (or even familiar with) the disciplines in which students hope to participate. Although there may be some concern (mostly from the students themselves) over the extent to which peers from differing disciplines may assist in developing students’ writing, it is commonly argued that receiving feedback from peers across the curriculum allows for interesting and productive discoveries not likely possible if working with students of the same discipline (see Silva et al.; Fredericksen and Mangelsdorf; Norris and Tardy; Sundstrom; Swales; Swales and Feak). Adult Education researchers Melissa S. Anderson and Judith P. Swazey likewise find that given the self-directedness and the vast experiences adult graduate learners bring with them, they often learn more from their adult peers than they do from their teachers and mentors, regardless of specific discipline.
Yet, the complexities of graduate ELL writing extend beyond high-stakes genres, language proficiency concerns, and enculturation politics. Graduate ELL writers face various challenges as individuals often entangled within cultural, interpersonal, and identity politics. In response, researchers have studied the sociopolitics of working with faculty, especially the kinds of close mentorship that typically occurs during the thesis and dissertation process or if collaborating with faculty on publications (Belcher, “The Apprenticeship Approach,” “An Argument for”; Casanave, “Looking Ahead”; Cho; Tardy, “’It’s Like a Story,’” Building Genre Knowledge; Blakeslee; Prior). Within this relationship and elsewhere, graduate ELLs often struggle with the “game playing” required to negotiate the “rules” of their disciplines and departments (Casanave, “Writing Games”), especially given their conflicting identities as novices and students on the one hand, and experts and legitimate peripheral participants (Lave and Wenger) on the other.5 As argued by Simpson, “As with undergraduate writers, graduate students are likely to need a variety of support at multiple stages in their trajectories, and given their other priorities and responsibilities, may need resources that are more flexible than some undergraduate services” (“Introduction” 11). Let us not also forget, to invoke scholarship in Adult Education, that graduate learners may be more likely to already be immersed in careers (Polson) and family life (Merriam & Brockett), and are also having to make significant time and financial sacrifices to attend graduate school (Crothers). Casanave gets at these issues in “What Advisors Need to Know about the Invisible ‘Real-Life’ Struggles of Doctoral Dissertation Writers,” describing students who struggle and strive differently when it comes to motivation and tenacity, health, family and relationships, advisors, time and energy, and writing.
The fact that these students are extraordinarily diverse necessitates ongoing examination of who they are and what they bring, want, and need. Adult Education, as a field, has extensively studied both adult learners and adult learning, focusing on how to best facilitate learning in this population given their diverging circumstances, diverse backgrounds, and disparate needs and goals. However, these complexities of adult learners have not been sufficiently acknowledged within Composition Studies. Instead, according to Alaina Tackitt, other identity markers or labels such as “veterans, anxious, professional, part-time, returning, life-long learners, distance learners, English Language Learners, international students, online learners” typically categorize adult learners (11). Tackitt goes on to say that “Employing alternate categorizations avoids addressing the role of being an adult learner as primary in the students’ experiences or as essential in the responses of teachers and instead shifts the focus to other considerations, allowing the role of adult learner to remain secondary, at best” (11). Tackitt helps to remind us, then, of the importance of explicitly naming and addressing adult learners as adult learners so that we may be more conscientious about identifying and addressing their strengths and needs. This should certainly be the case when designing and teaching graduate-level writing courses.
However, applying the label of “adult learner” to graduate contexts is complicated; we cannot simply assume all graduate students can be conceptualized within this framework just because of their age, for instance. While many scholars would consider an “adult learner” as any adult person who is learning something, I also find useful how the theoretical construct of the “adult learner” draws attention to so-called “returning” students or those who have been distanced from academic life—perhaps by time or other challenges—which may be reflected in their credentials, experience, attitude, and/or home or employment circumstances and responsibilities. In graduate writing classrooms, students will also vary not only in their backgrounds and disciplines, but also in their progress in their graduate degrees, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, experiences reading and writing in English, career levels, marital and parental status, and much more. Being international, transnational, an immigrant, English language learner, or person of color adds an additional layer to the diversity and identity politics facing adult graduate learners. Thus, the graduate writing classroom and its teachers’ pedagogies are necessarily driven by students’ disciplinary expertise and individualized needs. This situated and student-centered approach could mean that, for instance, students’ assignments and assessments may be individually tailored to their specialization and departmental demands. Jan Frodesen suggests instructors of graduate ELL writing courses invite students to be active participants and consider using a student/teacher negotiated syllabus. Such practices, she explains, afford students agency in selecting writing assignments related to their research interests and engaging in self-assessment. Frodesen further advocates for relying on students’ expertise, arguing that “there is much to gain by encouraging students to be active participants in and evaluators of their learning processes, by helping them to be ethnographers of their disciplines” (344).
The literature details many other courses in which students are also invited to design their own writing assignments, while in other studies the assignments are designated by the teacher or by department-set curriculum (e.g., assignments based on typical genres required in graduate studies like proposals, conference posters, or examination answers). But Frodesen’s notion of being “ethnographers of their own disciplines” is key and is easily connected to teaching principles in Adult Education. The kinds of formal study occurring in graduate-level writing courses, especially those modeled after the work of John Swales and Christine B. Feak, typically have been developed through genre-based pedagogies, though these approaches vary in their theoretical and disciplinary traditions. As Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff have shown, genre conceptually frames the teaching of writing in different yet often overlapping ways, depending on whether the framework stems from literary, linguistics, or rhetorical theory. Christine M. Tardy, however, explains that “a focus on genre, regardless of theoretical orientation, is grounded in the belief that helping students to demystify socially situated writing can facilitate the learning of privileged forms of discourse” (“The History” 2). When engaged in genre-based pedagogies, teachers take an explicit, systematic, needs-based, supportive, and empowering approach to help students gain both critical awareness of and practice with the genres and discourse communities in which they are engaged (Hyland 150). Thus, when gaining awareness of genre, students are better equipped with the critical analytical skills needed for more self-directed writing across disciplinary- and context-specific rhetorical situations.
The bottom line—a point that is relevant to conversations in Basic Writing—is this: when working with adult learners in either undergraduate or graduate contexts, we cannot rely on singular or previously useful pedagogical principles and practices. This is partly because, as Malcolm S. Knowles acknowledged long ago, adult learners may be resistant “to the strategies that pedagogy prescribe[s], including fact-laden lectures, assigned readings, drill, quizzes, rote memorizing, and examinations. Adults…want something more than this” (40). Adult learners not only “want something more;” they may also experience more stress and achieve less when traditional pedagogical methods, rather than andragogical, are used (Zmeyov 104). Knowles, Elwood F. Holton III, and Richard A. Swanson define andragogy as teaching theory and practice from the “standpoint of how adults learn” (xiv), whereas pedagogy is “the art and science of teaching children” (61). Various scholars of Adult Education, including Knowles, Holton III, and Swanson, have compared the teaching and learning of traditional versus adult learners (see also Pew; Merriam and Brockett; Taylor & Kroth).
These scholars argue that pedagogy assumes that those termed traditional learners are more dependent on instructors, have limited experience outside of school, are primarily motivated by external pressures (i.e., consequences, competition, grades), and are more accepting of prescribed, generalized curriculum. Andragogy, on the other hand, instead acknowledges that adult learners are more self-directed and practiced in self-assessment, have rich backgrounds and experiences from which to draw, are more motivated by internal pressures (i.e., improved quality of life, self-confidence, self-esteem), and are less open to generalized curricula prescribed in higher education than they are of curriculum that is individualized and immediately relevant to their real-life problems and situations. Readers of BWe may thus recognize that andragogy can be likened to various approaches called on in basic writing, including teaching that is problem-based, inquiry-based, self-directed, learner-centered, and transformative (Mezirow).
Although the focus of this article lies at the intersection of graduate writing and administration, I bring up these teaching and learning issues because any administrator of the kind of graduate writing course that I advocate for will necessarily need to be mindful of curricular issues, andragogy, and the professional development of both topics for teachers slotted to instruct these courses.
The Politics of Designing and Administrating Graduate Writing Courses
Given the vast findings on the challenges faced by graduate ELL writers and the desire from both the students and their faculty for written communication support to be made available, the limited resources and courses available to them (on a national level) as they write are, at the very least, counterintuitive (Mullen). In contexts where graduate writing courses are offered, they understandably serve very different purposes than undergraduate courses, mostly given the nature of graduate studies and graduate writing. Although these courses are sometimes designed specifically for certain disciplines and are offered alongside other departments such as architecture, engineering, or psychology (e.g., Lax; Simpson; Swales and Luebs; Swales et al.), the majority of courses described in the literature are interdisciplinary. And although most authors report on semester-long courses, some describe shorter, condensed courses offered over the summer or even as a series of workshops (e.g., Allison et al.; Autry and Carter; Swales and Luebs).
Some of the research on graduate-level writing focuses explicitly on course design and implementation, which is particularly relevant to my discussion of administration to follow. The scholarship examining the design and administration of graduate-level writing courses shows that these courses, given their nature and the distinctive needs of the students they serve, depend significantly on the demands of their institutional settings, are necessarily complex, and vary in their purpose, design, student population served, and overall approach. However, some recurring issues affecting these courses that instructors and administrators must consider, and that I reviewed above, include their interdisciplinary nature and the extent to which they are student driven. Other issues I’ll discuss in this subsection include the oft-political dynamics and effects of cross-departmental collaborations and course logistics, including enrollment, credit assigned to these courses, instructor selection, and other administrative negotiations.
The courses discussed in the literature often suggest the need to join efforts between students, students’ faculty mentors (when and if they are involved), and the writing instructor. In some cases, the instructor meets and interviews with students’ faculty advisors throughout the course (i.e., in order to gain additional insight on students’ needs and other disciplinary matters) (Richards), or the faculty member is invited to students’ presentations or to participate in assessing students’ written and oral projects (Frodesen). Simpson offers a compelling case for developing graduate writing support in order to “develop cross-campus partnerships and build respect for writing program work” (95). He understands “the ‘problem’ of graduate writing support [as] a systemic one, necessitating partnerships between writing programs and other university departments (e.g., writing centers, graduate offices, other departments in the disciplines)” (95). One of the three graduate writing resources Simpson has developed at the University of New Mexico includes “linked” graduate-level writing courses that share major writing assignments and that are developed alongside a disciplinary-focused class (e.g., mechanical engineering) and co-taught by a writing specialist and a disciplinary specialist. Such collaboration could indeed provide opportunities to deconstruct ideologies undergirding the politics of remediation facing graduate adult writers.
Many authors in the literature on graduate writing courses do not include full accounts of the course name and numbers or discuss whether they were required and offered for credit or not; however, those who do provide such details suggest interesting results. Some have been offered as required pass/fail courses for students who failed diagnostic exams (e.g., Silva et al.), but many are voluntary-based courses that offer at least some elective credit that may or may not count toward their degrees. The latter option thus leaves it up to students to carve out time from their studies and busy lives to get the support they need with no guarantees of such a course fulfilling graduation course credit requirements or being covered by their tuition waivers (if students have them). The politics revealed here may have to do with certain material realities or the extent to which respective universities and departments consider the courses to be remedial and worthy of university credit or of satisfying course/program requirements. We can easily imagine that these courses often require special expertise and ongoing departmental resources (including funding) and that students of these courses also must negotiate a number of concerns (e.g., having their motivations and needs met, managing the course load, dealing with extended graduation times, negotiating with financial sponsors, and/or seeking additional support from mentors). Those of us familiar with the politics of remediation in Basic Writing (Rose; Soliday) will note outright the importance of acknowledging these issues or else risk the perpetuation of assumptions that such considerations are not critical to fully understanding the context of these courses and the political ramifications that follow, especially when it comes to course logistics like funding and assigning course credits.
The administrative issues raised in some of the scholarship (and that I expand on with my own account in the next section) are regularly faced by Basic Writing administrators regardless of level (graduate or undergraduate) and regardless of their focus or not on ELLs. In their coauthored 1994 published account and analysis of a graduate-level writing course for ELLs, Tony Silva, Melinda Reichelt, and Joanne Lax-Farr question, among other issues, the problematic nature of the university writing requirement and assessment procedures that place students in their graduate ELL writing course in the first place. They also question whether such a course should be voluntary, interdisciplinary, and taught by language and writing specialists (instead of disciplinary experts), as well as to what extent instruction should focus on grammar, interdisciplinary peer collaboration, and students writing for “non-specialist audiences” (199). These same concerns, as most Basic Writing professionals can attest, are pervasive within the full range of what writing programs negotiate at programmatic and institutional levels.
One particular example, a writing course regularly offered at Purdue University, has been the subject of repeated study. In 1994, Silva et al. explored a graduate pass/fail no credit course, attempting to provide some sense of how such a course might be developed and sustained. Eight years later, Christine Norris and Christine M. Tardy provide additional reflection on the same course. Specifically, Norris and Tardy address the institutional politics of placement, credit, and grading. Based on conversations and interviews with students, the authors express concern over how to negotiate as teachers the assigning of heavy workloads and having high expectations when the course is pass/fail and offers no credit. As a result of this institutional requirement, the course does not count toward their advanced degrees (as it is assigned a 002 course number), is often taught by graduate students from the English department or ESL Writing Program and is limited in its workload so much that some students consider it to be “easy.” Norris and Tardy question the benefits and pitfalls of these factors. For example, they note that on the one hand a graduate student as teacher and a more lenient course requirement provide a safe and relaxed classroom environment; on the other hand, this may result in having a less experienced instructor, a different dynamic between student and teacher, and fewer opportunities to develop students’ writing than might be possible with a heavier workload. I would add, furthermore, that these factors—no-credit courses, graduate student teachers, and easier workloads—perpetuate remedial associations with graduate-level writing courses.
The literature on graduate-level writing courses makes important strides toward documenting programmatic initiatives to providing explicit writing instruction at the graduate level for ELL students; it draws out chief implications of teaching such courses and helps to illustrate issues needing consideration by teachers of comparable courses in other contexts. What is still needed are studies extending Simpson’s approach: detailed accounts of the administrative processes and politics involved when first developing and enacting writing courses for graduate students in higher education.
The Administrative Processes and Politics of Writing 600
In this section, I provide a praxis narrative of my experiences piloting a graduate-level writing course titled “Writing 600: Advanced Writing and Rhetoric for English Language Learners” (hereafter, Writing 600). This account emerges from a larger study conducted at Syracuse University (SU), in which I interviewed fourteen administrators across the institution as well as fourteen graduate students about their experiences with and perceptions on the institution’s approach to internationalization. For this article, I draw from my participant-observations, field notes, and course materials notes (dated from September 2010 to June of 2013), as they shed the most light on the administrative processes and politics involved when developing Writing 600. 6
Tom Fox and Rita Malenczyk define institutional politics in the context of administrative work as “the power relations present, yet often hidden, in any college or university—[that] can affect the [writing program administrator] in any number of profound and sometimes less-than-pleasant ways” (314). Given that stakes are high, resources are tight, and institutional politics are often opaque yet deeply significant, I seek to draw from my own administrative experience the kinds of processes and politics involved when developing a graduate-level writing course of which Basic Writing administrators in other contexts may want to understand. I recognize (and so should readers) that this study and my claims that follow are based on the situated circumstances of a single program and institution, and so they may not readily apply to other contexts. Still, Basic Writing experts will notice that the concerns I point to, such as the politics of remediation and language ideology, affect all facets of administrative work, whether they have anything to do with ELLs, graduate writing, or otherwise.
Writing 600: The Course and Course Logistics
We face, in Basic Writing, the longstanding challenge of having to demonstrate to university power players why and how the institution (and not just our respective writing program and departments) might better support students deemed basic writers, and why and how compositionists should be afforded the resources they need to lead the institution in effectively and ethically getting the job done. While I hope my praxis narrative provided in this article will be of use to others seeking the development of graduate-level writing resources, the story of Writing 600 is, regrettably, another administrative blunder for the books.
In response to learning about the increased need for graduate writing support at SU, especially for international ELL students, I collaborated in 2010-2011 with the SU Writing Center Committee and the director of the Writing Program at the time, Dr. Eileen Schell, to develop a proposal for a graduate-level writing course.
Dr. Schell approved my development of a pilot course, Writing 600, and I taught two sections during the 2011-2012 academic school year.7 The course would be limited to English language learners who would stand to earn three elective credits toward their M.A. or Ph.D. degrees. However, as we later discovered and as I will discuss below, credits earned and tuition costs would depend on students’ varying standings and situations within their respective graduate programs. For the pilot, Dr. Schell offered to limit registration to eight available spots for the pilot version so as to allow for additional time to develop curriculum, document the course’s proceedings, and archive textual materials and pedagogical reflections. When I advertised Writing 600, students across the disciplines immediately showed interest, and the course registration quickly filled. Students varied significantly in their cultural and educational backgrounds, their disciplines, their experience with and training in English, and their current level and progress in their graduate studies. A total of fourteen students enrolled (eight the first semester and six the next). All fourteen passed the course (grading was based on SU’s standard letter system), and all fourteen agreed to act as participants in the research study attached to the course.8
While my hands were full with unexpected administrative and pedagogical challenges, the course was well received by students and seemed to help them develop their writing in English and their knowledge about research and writing in their disciplines (based on my own observations, classroom observations from two Writing Program staff and faculty, observations made by students’ faculty mentors, students’ writing, students’ interviews and testimonies, and the anonymous course evaluations students completed).
Early on in the process of designing and implementing Writing 600, Dr. Schell and I discussed alternative options, such as the course bearing one unit of credit and being graded on a pass/fail basis. For my department, not assigning credit meant that the course would not generate tuition dollars, which could further perpetuate assumptions that writing programs should offer support for students as a service to the university rather than as a valued (both monetarily and ideologically) academic contribution. Just piloting the course meant that the program had to absorb the cost given its low enrollment cap; enrolling just eight students for the pilot was a one-time sacrifice made but not a sustainable option. Additionally, faculty labor in this department at SU is already overextended given the small size of the tenure-track faculty and the many demands they already balance. Thus, we simply could not afford to offer Writing 600 on our current budget and without generating some sort of income. But our major concern was that one-credit pass/fail courses offered within writing programs are historically viewed as remedial, as discussed above. Designating Writing 600 as a graduate course (with the “600” number instead of an undergraduate number like “400”), we hoped, would not only better reflect the workload and expertise expected of students and would not only provide them with credit they could actually apply (albeit as elective credits); it would also help legitimize systemically within the university that the course was academically challenging and appropriate to be offered at the graduate level. (An even more undesirable approach, in our perspectives, could have been to use course numbers falling below our required first-year writing course number “105,” inaccurately indicating it were some sort of prerequisite for the basic undergraduate university requirement).
Concerns over the politics of remediation are also why I adjusted the course title from “Writing Enrichment for Second Language Writers” to “Advanced Writing and Rhetoric for English Language Learners.” In short, the course number and title needed to reflect that its content and its students are advanced and the reputable and expansive field of Writing Studies informs the curriculum and course objectives. Moreover, neither version of the title included the term “international” (which would falsely assume that multilingual students are not also domestic), and the final version did not use “Nonnative English Speaker” or even “Second Language Writer,” as such classifications may imply a deficit-model of ELL students. However, in retrospect, I view labeling as indeed an issue that should have been further considered. Scholars have shown the intimate connections between identity and learning another language, and various scholars have argued that multilingual students react differently to the labels often assigned to them. For instance, so-called “Generation 1.5,” “ESL,” and “ELL” students may feel stigmatized and even insulted by the labels and the course placements and treatment by teachers that often follow (Harklau, Losey, and Siegal; see also Schwartz). Terms identifying a student as a “linguistic minority,” as Yuet-Sim D. Chiang and Mary Schmida document with their study of the American-born children of immigrants, can lead to problematic assumptions that the individual will struggle with English or that she does not “own” the language, assumptions that at times can be internalized within the individual’s identity (93). For these reasons and others, scholars have called for us to be critical with our labeling in and beyond the classroom. As Christina Ortmeier-Hooper argues, because “‘ESL,’ ‘bicultural,’ and ‘bilingual’ backgrounds are not always seen as positive markers by students, no matter how we try to frame diversity as a positive attribute,” when assigning labels and when addressing diversity we “need to proceed with prudence” (410). Indeed, when it comes to administrative labeling efforts, Dana Ferris has argued the importance of excluding these terms when titling courses since such labels could follow and negatively impact students later when employers or other gatekeepers review their transcripts and, accordingly make assumptions and the high-stakes decisions that follow. Ideally, and in retrospect, Writing 600 would have simply been open to all students, ELL or otherwise, and titled something like “Introduction to Graduate Writing.”
Although further reflection could have been useful, the decisions Dr. Schell and I made about the logistics of Writing 600 were an effort to establish credibility for the course, to offer usable credits to students, to maintain the department’s material demands, and to preemptively contest future assumptions of the course being remedial. Having Writing 600 bear three units of university graduate-level credit, however, led to some unexpected and undesirable outcomes. With only two weeks to go before the first day of the Fall 2011 semester, we advertised the course (via an email flyer sent to graduate department listservs that directed students to email me in order to register). Within the next two weeks, I received nearly sixty emails from students interested in Writing 600. I was immediately encouraged at what appeared to be a high demand for Writing 600 (especially since most students had finalized their course schedules months ago); nevertheless, it was ultimately disappointing to learn that many students would not be eligible for the course due to departmental policies, financial realities, and time constraints.
The issue was that many prospective students—depending on their status in the university and the policies of their department—discovered that they could not enroll in or secure funds to pay for the course. In particular, those who were not teaching or research assistants (TAs and RAs), and thus who were paying out of pocket (which is the case for most MA students at NU), opted out because of costs; meanwhile those considered “visiting students” (who were studying at SU for a limited period and who were planning to graduate at a different institution, usually in their home countries) often found that their financial sponsors refused to pay for the tuition of the course. An unknown number of students did not attempt to enroll (I received more than a dozen inquiries about funding concerns) and a total of eight students had to drop upon realizing they could not cover the costs of the course. One student from Palestine who was studying at SU for two years before returning to his home institution negotiated for his financial sponsor to pay for half the course, leaving the remaining balance to come out of pocket.
According to some students, and oddly enough given how writing-intensive graduate studies almost always are, their sponsors did not consider Writing 600 to be relevant to their majors. This was the case even for an Afghan student (working under the supervision and financial support of his government) who was studying journalism. However, this problem not only affected visiting students and those without TA and RA lines. Some SU departments and their policies did not permit Writing 600 to count towards students’ degrees, while some students were only permitted a certain amount of units to take each semester and in total, and so it was impossible or too difficult for them to make Writing 600 fit. I thus received emails from students who informed me that they must regretfully withdraw since their advisors said Writing 600 “cannot be applied to [their] program.” One student who successfully completed Writing 600 (with the permission of his advisor) discovered after the fact that the course would not count toward his graduation requirements. While ultimately unsuccessful, he petitioned that decision with my support. The waiting list for the Fall 2011 course was long enough that it was not a problem filling open spots; however, for the Spring 2012 semester, two students did not find out they had to withdraw (due to being unable to secure financial sponsorship) until after a few weeks had already passed, and at that point it was too late to enroll others.9
Another issue that prevented students from being able to take Writing 600 was the heavy workload of the course. Even without the course counting toward their degrees, many students were willing to accumulate the extra three credits of Writing 600 (even if they had pay themselves) so as to get some additional support with their writing; however, after reading over the syllabus during the screening/enrollment process, many students decided that they could not afford the time required to complete such a demanding course. Although enrolled students knew from the start that the workload was comparable to other graduate courses, at least one-quarter of those who completed Writing 600 still lamented at some point (in conversation, reflection writing, or course evaluations) that the course was demanding and they were concerned about finding time to manage it alongside their other departmental coursework and responsibilities.
Deciding who would teach Writing 600 in the future proved to be another contentious issue requiring Dr. Schell’s and my careful negotiation. Although it is common for graduate students to teach graduate ELL writing courses like Writing 600—and despite the fact that at the time I, as a doctoral student, designed and piloted the course—Dr. Schell and I had questioned whether or not graduate students from my department would be permitted to teach the course. At first, Dr. Schell and I had opposing perspectives. I advocated for having graduate students teach the course because I suspected that the demanding workloads of our program’s faculty would mean the course would not be offered regularly, nor would it be likely that multiple sections could be offered during any given semester. Further, one of the most valued pedagogical tools of the course (according to my observations and unanimous agreement among all fourteen student participants) was one-on-one consulting with students on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, something faculty would not be as likely to manage given their many other commitments. As a secondary benefit, having graduate students from our program teach Writing 600 would allow for the professional development of our graduate students in the teaching of ELL writing, something not often afforded given the division of labor (Matsuda “Composition Studies”) between so-called “1st Language ” and “2nd Language” writing courses.
I was compelled, nonetheless, by Dr. Schell’s insistence that having a graduate student teach Writing 600 supports the assumption that such a course does not demand full-time faculty status and expertise. We worried, for instance, that the university status and salary of graduate students would lead others to assume the course had less value and legitimacy. Hence, it could have reaffirmed inaccurate assumptions that the course is remedial and not of the same merit as mainstream classes taught by “real” professors (though, Sundstrom’s account of the Graduate Writing Program at the University of Kansas certainly challenges this notion). If we wanted to legitimize Writing 600 in a sustainable and systemic way, Dr. Schell preferred that full-time faculty teach future sections. If exceptions were to be made and additional graduate students were to teach it, it would be because they had special expertise and interest in teaching ELL writing. In essence, we were trying to address the long established and intractable issues facing writing programs, especially when it comes to Basic Writing, including the prominence of these courses being taught by teachers assumed (wrong or right) to be inexperienced or contingent. We frequently found ourselves at an impasse since, as writing instructors and administrators, we had the expertise to offer this resource, but the material issues with sustaining the course were substantial and led us to question at times whether we were setting the program up to be seen as capable of providing this service without institutional backing. We knew that the program could not absorb the cost of this resource for long, but we hoped that if there proved to be student demand, we could make a case to university administrators for receiving institutional support.
To provide a bit of historical context, I should also mention that Dr. Schell’s and my decisions to sacrifice at times certain pedagogical or departmental goals in order to address concerns of the politics of remediation were influenced by past encounters and current pressures from our dean and the larger university. Years before Writing 600, the Writing Program had put forth a committee whose efforts led to requesting funds from the school to create additional writing resources for international graduate students. Despite their efforts and numerous attempts, the committee was denied institutional funding and was told to be “entrepreneurial”—to fund it themselves by seeking alternative structures such as workshops or zero-credit courses paid for by students or their departments. I also learned that during the design of Writing 600, the Writing Program was being pressured by external administrators to find better ways to “fix” the problems of student writing and error, especially in international student writing. Unfortunately, outside complaints about student writing did not accompany discussions of tactical change or the university funding of new resources. Thus, when initiating Writing 600, we were concerned over placing the department in yet another position of service without equal commitment or explicit economic support from the institution. Dr. Schell explained that while the department could manage offering the course once a year, we could not offer numerous sections until we received institutional support for such an endeavor.
The issue remained that the Writing Program cannot and should not take on the entire responsibility for supporting graduate students in developing literacies despite our best intentions in wanting to do more. Gail Shuck in her “Combating Monolingualism: A Novice Administrator’s Challenge” likewise documents the negative outcomes when the rest of the university assumes that certain specialists or departments will single-handedly “fix” the “problem” with ELL writing. In line with Shuck, Simpson, in his discussion of graduate-level writing resources implemented at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, perceives cross-campus collaborations as “critical to the success and sustainability of these programs” as well as helpful in sparking “opportunities to initiate conversations about graduate writing on campus and to forge new partnerships (108). Simpson’s aim was to “build an infrastructure for graduate student support without confirming notions of our department as a ‘service’ entity” (105). Dr. Schell’s and my development of Writing 600 resonates with these values and tactics, but our approach differed in the ways in which we felt pressured in our institutional context to be “entrepreneurial” and package a successful course before being granted larger university buy-in. In the long run, our efforts were in vain since we later realized that cross-collaborations, such as those advocated by Shuck and Simpson, were necessary to forge from the beginning.
After my year of teaching Writing 600, the course was offered again the following fall (2012) and was taught by a full-time faculty member in our department. Similar problems with students’ securing financial sponsorship resulted in only six of sixteen spots in the course being filled. The Writing Center Committee and I began brainstorming ways to address these issues, namely by seeking additional funding and cross-institutional partnerships for administering Writing 600. Unfortunately, before we were able to create such opportunities, when the course was offered a third time low enrollment led to it being cancelled, and it has not been offered since. Depending on whether future cross-disciplinary collaborations and funds can be secured, Writing 600 may very well not be offered again at SU.
It is true that we can interpret limitations in departmental resources, cross-curriculum graduation requirements, and student financial circumstances as inevitable material realities we face as administrators working in Basic Writing and beyond. But we can further understand these hurdles by considering the linguistic ideologies undergirding them. Those obstacles facing administrative initiatives like Writing 600 (that address linguistic diversity and that support students deemed underprepared) reflect longstanding assumptions about the cultural expectations set for writing and writers in higher education: that a certain level of (but often undefined and always abstract) standardized English must be attained by students in order to attend and certainly to advance in college; that writing deemed nonstandard or writing signaling a student’s language differences is interpreted as an error problem in need of being fixed; and that reconciling language differences is the responsibility of the individual, not the institution. Such notions can be further traced to an array of monolingualist ideologies—that is, when we deny or ignore the linguistic diversity that exists in graduate education, we buy into the myth of linguistic homogeneity commonly applied to undergraduate studies, whereby students are assumed to be mainstream native English speakers are thus taught as such (Matsuda, “The Myth”), whereby only the standardized variety of English is valued and accepted (Shuck, Tardy), and whereby institutions attempt to “contain” users of other languages and varieties through placement practices, basic writing and ESL courses, language institutes and writing centers (Matsuda, “The Myth”). Monolingualism in the form of standard language ideology “work[s] to exclude, segregate, track, and define students with the notion that non-standard language practices are deficient and inappropriate for public, academic, and official purposes” (Watson and Shapiro, n.p.; see also Lippi-Green; Wiley and Lukes). The monolinguistic value systems apparent at SU likely reflect the cultural climate at many institutions across the US. These beliefs are what drive the system to label graduate courses as remedial, to not assign credit to graduate-level writing courses, and to not systemically support and fund graduate writing.
As even this partial account of my experiences with Writing 600 shows, separating departmental politics from interdepartmental and international politics and language ideologies is unlikely. As we teased out programmatic and administrative issues, it was impossible to make decisions without considering how they would impact (or be impacted by) outsiders’ perceptions, future collaborations, and the materialities of students, our program, and the institution.
Administrative Concerns for Enacting Graduate Writing Courses
The findings from my praxis narrative of Writing 600 and from previous research reveal a hefty number of issues worth synthesizing. In this section, I catalog some of these concerns in the form of guiding questions that other teachers and administrators may consider when enacting similar resources.10 Despite the breadth of issues uncovered, this catalog is far from comprehensive and should be considered a working list that will require administrators’ individualized rhetorical negotiations based on the situated circumstances of their site-specific contexts. The actual policies, documents, and systems that must be traversed are likely many, only some of which I mention here. Nevertheless, I hope that what follows may be useful to administrators as they imagine, initiate, and enact graduate-level writing courses or even other resources for ELLs. Here are the questions that helped guide my own process:
(1) What purposes will the course serve?
(2) Who (or what entity) will be charged with spearheading the initiative and following through on its progress?
(3) How and by whom will the course be sponsored and financially supported?
(4) Where will the course be housed within the institution?
(5) Who will teach the course, and why?
(6) How will the course be officially included in the institution’s course offerings?
(7) What placement procedures will be used to enroll students?
(8) How will the course be evaluated? What will be evaluated, when, why, how, and by/for whom?
(9) How will the course be sustained?
Over the next several paragraphs, I elaborate on each of these key questions.
1. What purposes will the course serve? Many of the guiding questions posed here are interconnected and overlap, but this initial question will likely have the greatest impact on how the course is carried out. What has influenced the course’s initiation? Who has proposed it and why? Will a given department, for instance, develop it out of observations that students want or need it? Will it result from the institution’s leading administrators in response to new internationalizing goals? Will the course be used to fulfill a graduation requirement or to prepare students for university writing exam? Will it be offered voluntarily to all or select students? Will it be a required or gatekeeping course for entering international graduate students and/or students identified as ELLs? How will these issues be decided and how will developers tease out the implications of their choices?
2. Who (or what entity) will be charged with spearheading the initiative and following through on its progress? According to Sundstrom, when enacting graduate-level writing resources, “questions about where the program should live, where the courses should be offered, and what the funding basis should be…will be of paramount importance” (np). Ideally, the individuals working toward the change would hold status and insider knowledge or at least have a means through which to locate and access that information. A project of this nature may also require years of continuous labor and negotiation, making it complicated and perhaps less ideal to appoint leaders whose stay at the institution is limited (i.e., graduate students or those soon to retire) or whose position is subordinate or contingent.
3. How and by whom will the course be sponsored and financially supported? Like all institutional resources, graduate-level writing resources need economic backing. Securing funding could mean anticipating, researching, and negotiating not only the financial and material constraints of our institutions and departments (and ideally our interdepartmental partnerships), but also the financial and material constraints of students, their departments, and their financial sponsors (including those across national borders).
4. Where will the course be housed within the institution? In the case of Writing 600, we housed the course in the Writing Program; however, as mentioned, a more sustainable approach might have been to offer the course in other departments where funding could be secured so that students were not financially responsible for the course. This reflects yet another set of reasons to collaborate across institutional divides: a) economically, housing the course in other departments may help secure financial sustainability (and potentially fund the teaching of the course); b) disciplinarily, it prevents further association of writing programs as serving the role as the university’s sole “fixers” of student writing; and c) pedagogically, students will benefit from working with writing instructors in addition to (or even alongside) their departmental advisors (i.e., English for Academic Purposes courses housed in other disciplines are often structured so that the writing instructor and students’ advisors collaborate and even share in teaching and assessment). That said, this solution is also susceptible to failing if the departments that house the course are not sufficiently supportive or if they falter in their commitment. Even if the collaboration among institutional constituencies is not a financial one, furthermore, gaining the labor and endorsement from faculty across the curriculum will ideally promote wider awareness and acceptance of the course and be cause for more university-wide recognition and support (see Simpson). Of course, unless housing the course within a general program or institutional entity (i.e., the Graduate School or Chancellor’s Office), having the course belong to certain departments will ultimately shape the course content and place limits on student enrollment, excluding many students across the institution. Weighing the pitfalls and benefits to decisions like these no doubt plays a major part in each guiding question listed here.
5. Who will teach the course, and why? While most graduate-level writing courses for ELLs are taught by language and writing specialists, some are co-taught by faculty in other disciplines, especially if offered in a department outside of a writing program. Is co-teaching possible or preferable? Having the course taught by doctoral students in English, writing, or linguistics is an option that may appeal economically to institutions, but, as mentioned, may perpetuate the politics of remediation. Is it possible for a new position to be created and a new instructor hired? How might you ensure that there will be professional development opportunities in place to provide necessary training in andragogy for prospective teachers?
6. How will the course be officially included in the institution’s course offerings? What will the course title and number be, and why? Will that title or number reflect remediation, and can that be rectified? Will the course bear credits, and can those be at the graduate level instead of at the undergraduate? What will the enrollment capacity be? If institutional authorities set the capacity too high,11 is it possible to negotiate that number down? How will the course be described in the institution’s catalog? Finally, and importantly, what are the policies and procedures for registering a course with the institution? What office(s) handle this process? What forms are involved? Is there a trial period, and if so, what follow-up is necessary to ensure the course obtains permanent status and is regularly offered? Who will manage these logistics now and over time?
7. What placement procedures will be used to enroll students? The literature regarding the placement of graduate language learners has taken issue with the politics of identifying and placing students in courses designated for ELLs, offering discussions on the many obstacles and ethics worth considering as these practices are defined and redefined in our institutions (see, for example, Callahan; Costino and Hyon; Crusan, “An Assessment”; Crusan, “The Promise”; di Gennaro; Gleason; Haswell; Leki; Plakans and Burke). While it is important to address this concern with careful attention, unfortunately, depending on the circumstances, this issue may be implemented institutionally and without many options for negotiation (e.g., in cases where the course is used as a graduation requirement and higher-ups call shots or if the course is department specific and administrators there make this decision). If this is not the case, and if enrollment is open and voluntary, what constraints (if any) should be placed on who can enroll?
8. How will the course be evaluated? What will be evaluated, when, why, how, and by/for whom? Once the course is active, evaluating the outcomes will be instrumental for ongoing development. Since any new course is experimental and tenuous, evaluating the administration of it is just as critical as evaluating the pedagogical approach and students’ experiences, rather than simply student outcomes. Administrators may want to be especially attentive to documenting progress and reporting success so as to have ready evidence that supports their case to continue offering the course.
9. How will the course be sustained? The issue of sustainability is an important factor that has already been implied in many of the questions above. Anticipating potential ideological and material roadblocks and locating sources for ongoing and future successes is essential albeit incredibly difficult. Some strategies to rely on have already been mentioned, including identifying appropriate agents to lead the initiative, gaining the support of your department and other institutional gatekeepers, securing financial sponsorship, finding ways to collaborate across institutional divides, utilizing and following up on institutional policies for enacting new resources, carefully evaluating and documenting the course’s proceedings, building a case in support of the resource being developed, creating spaces to share and archive curricular and pedagogical materials and reflections, etc. To elaborate on the issue of documentation, one contentious concern that affects sustainability may be negotiating the role writing and genre play in this administrative process. Namely, I am referring to the challenging work of discovering and then utilizing what are often occluded genres 12 of the institution (e.g., letters, proposals, grants, petitions, forms, contracts, recommendation letters, reports, etc.). How might these genres be located and successfully employed, especially if administrators are not aware of or familiar with them?
Another issue worth considering that relates to sustainability and student placement procedures is student attrition. Will student attrition be a problem? If so, why? How can attrition concerns be researched ahead of time and prevented? One of the major factors preventing Writing 600 from continuing was the low enrollment of students (a problem itself related to other problems, mostly that students could not pay for the course or apply its credit towards their degrees). I also suspect that advertising the course was a factor impacting Writing 600 (in all honestly, we needed to advertise it more widely and in a more timely fashion). How can and should the resource be presented, promoted, and circulated? Even deciding what day and time to offer the course may affect enrollment. I received dozens of inquiries from students who very much wanted to enroll but could not take the course simply because of time conflicts with their program’s course requirements.
As was true for Writing 600, and as will likely be the case for other similar initiatives, many of the discoveries to each of these questions emerge just a little too late. After all, despite even the best efforts, not all conflicts can be anticipated. Having to cope with and respond to problematic administrative structures is no doubt a necessary part of enacting institutional change. The breakdown of certain attempted courses, nevertheless, does not dictate the failure of alternative endeavors. The administrative structures that led Writing 600 to be discontinued afforded me new knowledge and perspectives that will result in stronger, and more sustainable efforts in the future. Searching for, celebrating, and making the best use of these silver linings of administrative hurdles may help propel future successes. Studying and then sharing our administrative trials, tribulations, and triumphs may also aid in reshaping notions held by administrators and teachers across the curriculum about graduate writing and writers so that we may better align the needs of our students with the support that we offer.
Conclusion
As for finding and using graduate-level writing resources, there are various institutional and ideological concerns, as well as a number of constituencies and stakeholders whose policies or expectations may conflict when it comes to determining just what a given resource should and should not accomplish (not to mention where, how, and why). Making public our efforts to address the writing needs of graduate students may allow for more rhetorical approaches to enacting change in our and others’ institutions. Although the issue of graduate-level writing is growing, more scholarship is needed that documents pedagogical concerns and administrative practices and politics. I believe that the fields of Basic Writing and Adult Education are uniquely positioned and already poised to contribute to the scholarship on and teaching of graduate-level writing. And basic writing administrators attempting to develop new resources for ELL graduates will be served well by supplementing their own disciplinary expertise with research in Adult Education as well as the scholarship on graduate-writing courses.
The task facing basic writing administrators interested in enacting graduate-level writing courses within their institutions is, to say the least, a challenging one. Nevertheless, the need for deliberate action cannot be overstated. Swales et al. argue that developers of these courses are often “unnecessarily passive in [their] acceptance of institutional practices and percepts” (440). And it is not difficult to understand why. Negotiating institutional systems and ideologies about graduate writing instruction is an uphill battle, perhaps especially when it requires combatting standard language ideologies and the notions of remediation that follow. It may feel like an impossible endeavor to convince some of our colleagues that courses like Writing 600 belong in the university and are not remedial much less stakeholders across disciplinary and national divides. Whenever it is within our means, we should intentionally contest monolingualist assumptions and the politics of remediation, remembering that the administrative choices we make now will impact (in one way or another) our institution’s values and the treatment of students and their writing that follow. Thus, in those important moments when the opportunity strikes to implement change and to contest harmful language attitudes, we in Basic Writing may serve ourselves better in the long run by making tough decisions, forging cross-disciplinary collaborations, and crafting persuasive cases when designing and implementing graduate-level writing resources.
Notes
1 English for Academic Purposes (EAP), as a field, is a branch of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and, more generally, of the discipline of English Language Teaching (ELT) (interchangeable with the discipline of TESOL, the Teaching of English as a Second or Other Language). ESP commonly tailors to the teaching of English for specific trades or business contexts (e.g., Business English, Scientific English, etc.), while EAP’s specific focus is teaching Academic English and typically within higher education contexts. While interest in graduate-levelwriting instruction has flourished mostly in the field of English for Academic Purposes (with a focus on ELLs), we can see a shift in scholarly attention toward graduate writing and writers emerging in the 1980s (e.g., Huckin & Olsen, 1984; McKenna, 1987; Richards, 1988; Shen, 1989; Swales, 1987). Since these fields have been researching for decades how to support linguistically diverse students, it is insufficient to merely nod to them; rather, we in basic writing would benefit greatly from starting with and building from the considerable research in EAP and SLW. See also the 1973 CCCC’s resolution on composition for graduate students (“Focused”), and see Mastrangelo for an account of the earliest attempts at graduate-level writing instruction developed by Fred Newton Scott between 1890 and 1926.
2 See also the invaluable website sponsored by the Consortium on Graduate Communication, which includes numerous resources, including sample syllabi (https://www.gradconsortium.org/).
3 Perhaps a better option, as argued by Steve Simpson, is to “provide explicit opportunities for both native and non-native English speakers and [to] put the two populations in conversation with each other” (106). Separating the two populations may be problematic and may also lead us to missing the mark when it comes to supporting all graduate students and their writing needs and to combating the notion that only some graduate writers (i.e., those who are deemed deficient) would benefit from explicit instruction and from more diverse classrooms. See also Lee and Kamler; Paré; Fairbanks and Dias.
4TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) is one of the most common standardized exams of English language proficiency used globally by students pursuing higher education in English-speaking institutions.
5 Studies on the phenomenon of student-faculty interactions often adopt the analytical perspective on learning developed by anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Based on numerous case studies of trade-based apprenticeships, the authors advance that situated learning via authentic albeit peripheral participation assists in the disseminating of skills, practices, and traditions valued by specific communities of practice (e.g., Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman; Casanave “Writing Games”; Li “A Doctoral Student,” “Negotiating Knowledge”; Prior).
6 To begin the inquiry, and while still focused on student writing and pedagogical inquiries, I spent a year taking field notes on my processes, experiences, and reflections administering, developing, and teaching the course, and I collected as textual data all course-based materials, including administrative documents, student writing, and communications. Over the two semesters that I taught the course (one section in the fall of 2011 and another in spring 2012), I met weekly with graduate students enrolled in Writing 600 to work on their writing (for a total of at least five hours of face-to-face time with each student) in addition to interviewing each student twice. In these meetings and interviews, I learned details about how and when students learned English, how they came to pursue education at NU, their motivations and writing processes, their experiences seeking and receiving support on their writing during their graduate studies, and their perceptions about their needs and strengths as writers, as well as the strengths and limitations of graduate studies at NU.
7 A version syllabus of the course can be located at https://www.gradconsortium.org/resources/courses-and-syllabi/. The course is listed under Adrian Wurr (as “Academic Writing for Graduate Students”). Wurr adopted and slightly adapted my syllabus to use at the University of Tulsa. In short, the 3-credit course, “Advanced Writing and Rhetoric for English Language Learners” was offered on a voluntary basis to graduate students across the disciplines. It was designed based on research in genre-based pedagogies, especially those described in the literature from English for Academic Purposes and Rhetorical Genre Studies. Three major assignments guided the course trajectory and thus informed class discussions and activities as well as other smaller research and writing tasks. The first major assignment asked students to study, analyze, and write up a short report on the rhetorical expectations of a disciplinary-specific genre of their choice. The second major assignment asked students to learn about and then perform discourse analysis on a number of articles in a self-selected journal published in their field. The third and final major assignment (which actually stretched the entire semester) was a sustained writing project based on an authentic and timely writing requirement students faced within their departments and disciplines (e.g., conference paper or presentation, seminar paper, research article, dissertation chapter). Students and I met each week for two hours as a group, and then each student met for a one-hour writing consultation with either an assigned writing center consultant or me. The group hours allowed time for students to engage in shared learning with their peers and to be exposed to other students’ writing and perspectives, while the consultation hour provided the opportunity for students to receive individual attention on their writing.
8 Of the fourteen student participants, five were female and nine were male. More than one quarter of students were Chinese (4), three were Korean, and two were Turkish. The remaining five students were Palestinian, Iranian, Japanese, Kenyan, and Indian. Their respective languages include Mandarin (4), Korean (3), Turkish (2), Japanese, Arabic (2), Kiswahili (1), and Marathi (1). Four were visiting students who were attending SU for only one or two semesters and the remaining participants were regularly matriculated students. A high majority (thirteen of fourteen) were international students, most of whom intended to return to their home countries upon graduation, while just one student was domestic (and had immigrated to the US at age seventeen). Five were studying for their master’s degrees, while nine were in Ph.D. programs (varying from first to fourth year doctoral students). The breakdown of students’ disciplines were as follows: four were in education, two in ecology, another two in public administration, and one each in finance, bioengineering, museum studies, child and family studies, entrepreneurship, and art history.
9 One of these students requested that she audit the course. In fact, this proved to be another disappointing outcome of having the course bear three units since many students requested to audit the course for time and financial reasons. Despite my wishes for this possibility, the Writing Program at SU does not permit auditing, and for good reason. Student auditors in the course results in extra work for the instructor without commensurate tuition dollars to the department in return. Furthermore, the nature of Writing 600 demands significant time and effort from students in order to fulfill the course outcomes and to develop students’ knoweldges and practices. Thus, it just does not make sense for students to have a limited and peripheral experience with courses like Writing 600, which is sometimes the case with auditing.
10 While pedagogical implications are also many when designing and implementing courses like Writing 600, I limit my discussion to administrative concerns given the focus of my study and the lack of attention on this issue in the literature. At times, as will be made apparent, however, pedagogy and administration are inseparable. To be clear, the research I present is not meant to compel other WPAs to enact the exact course as the one I describe. Instead, I offer in this article my situated administrative praxis narrative of implementing a new writing resource (within the constraints of my program) to offer one example of what can go well, what can go wrong, what others might try, and what I intend to implement in future efforts. It will be apparent that my targeted subjects here are those working in the field of basic writing; however, I imagine (and hope) that individuals teaching writing in other disciplines could adapt the issues I cover.
11 The Conference on College Composition and Communication’s (CCCC’s) "Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing" states that, “No more than 20 students should be permitted in any writing class. Ideally, classes should be limited to 15.” Dr. Schell and I decided to cap enrollment of Writing 600 at 16 (though the pilot version was capped at 8).
12 John Swales in his Genre Analysis and again in "Occluded Genres in the Academy" coins and describes this term as referring to academic genres that are highly political and exclusively known to insiders, remaining altogether hidden or at best opaque to outsiders.
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Acknowledgements
This manuscript is based closely off chapter four of my dissertation. Many thanks are due to Michelle Cox, Rebecca Moore Howard, Eileen Schell, and Christine Tardy for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. Thanks are also due to Sonia Feder-Lewis, Christine Photinos, and Barbara Gleason for their excellent editorial support.
Missy Watson
Missy Watson is assistant professor at City College of New York, CUNY, where she teaches undergraduate composition and graduate courses in composition pedagogy, language, literacy, and linguistics. She has recently published work in the Journal of Basic Writing, Composition Forum, Composition Studies, and the Journal of Second Language Writing.