CCCC 2005: ReviewReview: B.02 Testing the Waters of Mainstreaming: Why We Did It and What We Found Presenters: Dylan Dryer, Katherine Malcolm, Lisa Riecks, and Aimee Krall-Lanoue, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee As a first time attendee at the CCCC this year, I was still flipping through the overwhelming scheduling book when this session started. I wanted to attend this particular session because I thought it would give a historical overview of mainstreaming and the different strategies that the composition field had developed. What I discovered was a very specific and detailed plan of how a mainstreaming pilot looked at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus. In the presentation Dylan Dryer gave a background and explanation of the pilot at UWM. Katherine Malcolm gave the audience a sense of what the actual pilot looked like. Lisa Riecks talked about the identity of the instructor while Aimee Krall-Lanoue talked about the student identity. Dryer offered a critique of UWM basic writing program, which like many programs across the nation, forces students who perform poorly on an entrance exam to take a non-credit three unit introductory course to writing before the regular freshmen composition. The entrance exam has no actual writing component. It consists of a grammar section and a reading comprehension section. If the student who performed poorly on the entrance exam did not satisfactorily complete the required sequence of courses within a year, they were subject to dismissal from the school. What is particularly attractive in this session is that UWM’s answer to their basic writing dilemma is similar to the one at my institution, California State University Sacramento (CSUS). Like UWM, CSUS developed a special sequence one-unit credit/no-credit class (which UWM calls English 105 and CSUS calls English 1X) that is taken simultaneously with the regular freshmen composition course (what UWM calls English 101 and CSUS calls English 1A). This special one unit class has an enrollment cap of eight students and students from each section may come from as many as eight different English 101 classes. One of the distinctions of the English 105 class at UWM from the English 1X class at CSUS is the autonomy with which it operates. Not only is the roster of students enrolled in English 105 kept confidential from their English 101 instructors, but English 105 instructors are asked not to communicate with English 101 instructors about their students. Therefore, if English 105 instructors receive feedback on an assignment or gain insight with a particular student, they could share this information with their supervisor. The supervisor could then share this information with the whole group of English 101 instructors. The only way English 101 instructors would know that a particular student may be enrolled in English 105 is if that student chose to disclose this information. The rationale for this confidentiality is that UWM did not want a reporting relationship to build between English 105 and English 101 instructors. Additionally, they suggested that these two classes should really work autonomously. While I respect UWM’s rationale for the autonomy of English 105 and 101, my experience as an English 1X instructor counters UWM’s reasoning. Because the classes are so closely related, it seems beneficial for the students (and instructors) participating in these classes to work cooperatively with one another. On my campus the two sets of classes (English 1A and English 1X) usually operate independently. However, English 1A instructors are aware from their class rosters which of their students are in English 1X. Likewise, English 1X instructors have the English 1A syllabi for their English 1X students. Either an English 1A instructor or an English 1X instructor can initiate contact. In the past two semesters, I have had sixteen students and only initiated contact twice. In both instances, this led to a collaborative conversation where both the English 1A teacher and I brainstormed how best to support the student. In neither case did the English 1A instructor talk to me in a condensing or unprofessional manner nor did the conversation turn into a gossiping session about the student. It appears to me that if we are asking our students to participate in a collaborative environment where they may have to deliberate demands and boundaries, that we might also expect the same kind of hard work for ourselves. The other distinction between UWM and CSUS programs is the instructor training. The two instructors of English 105 had previous experience teaching the “basic writing” course and teaching the English 101 course. For the pilot, UWM thought it critical to have 105 instructors who had previous teaching experience. At CSUS, English 1X instructors are graduate students who may have tutored in the Writing Center or taken an internship class; however, none have taught the freshmen English class or a “basic writing” class. The philosophy behind this approach (as I understand it) is that with less professional distance between the instructor and student the student should view the instructor as an older peer, a mentor. The panel addressed this point when Riecks reported that English 105 instructors identified themselves as planners (and theoretically their training prepared them for this). Ironically, Riecks testified that those class sessions that were teacher-centered were viewed as less successful than classes that were deemed as student-centered. When the instructor was able to throw out the list of guided questions and let the student concerns and dialogue take the center stage, the discussion reportedly went better. In this role, I believe that English 105 and English 1X instructors really do walk back and forth on a line between instructor and mentor. Like Malcolm who suggests that these classes help students “negotiate the demands of the university,” I believe that small class size and group collaboration seems to allow a more intimate experience of the university, one that may bridge the gap between those students who perform poorly on standardized tests and those that do not. In her presentation, Krall-Lanoue argues that a program like English 105 operates distinct from the “foreigner” and “assimilation” space and instead creates a third space. This space empowers the collective experience. Rather than stigmatize these writers as outsiders, this kind of space recognizes that these students have prior writing experience but may initially lack confidence. This third space builds a community of writers who, with the support of the English 105 instructor, learn to understand and meet the demands of the freshmen composition class. While the presenters did an excellent job of spelling out the details of the pilot and giving the audience a sense of how this project actually looked on their campus, it was during the question and answer time that the difficult questions were raised. The audience response disappointed me greatly. They were fixated on the fact that the group of students in this pilot program volunteered. Therefore, if English 105 students succeeded (at the 87% rate reported by UWM) it may have been because they were more motivated to take on the challenge to begin with. The panel acknowledged that this was a flaw in the system. They only had 82 volunteers out of the hundreds they invited (they also speculated that inviting students via mail was probably a contributor to the relatively low participation). The panelists stated that they planned on continuing this pilot into next school year with some modifications. Like directed (or informed) self-placement these one unit credit/no-credit supplementary classes propose to give students a choice about how they start their writing careers in higher education. More importantly, it offers to do this without attempting to stigmatize these students who are taking entrance exams that, as many concede, do not actually test their writing ability anyway. |
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