Testing the Waters of Mainstreaming: Why We Did It and What We Found


This panel addressed the panelists’ experiences with implementing a studio program at the university. In this program, students who test into basic writing are instead placed in mainstream classes. In order to provide additional help, these students are required to attend a one credit “studio” course.  Dylan Dryer: “‘Place’ as a Noun and Verb: Figuring the ‘Companion’ Course to English 101.”

Dryer makes the argument that one of the reasons that students do so well in University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s writing studio program is because of the way the program is described. Course descriptions speak loudly to students. An advisor confronted with poor, unhelpful descriptions would have little of use to say to students.  When his program began planning, they found they had little idea of what they wanted the program to look like. The committee work revealed that they needed to spend a lot of time designing their program. They thought about creating a forum in which students would prepare for 101, or perhaps a forum in which students could meet 101 and 102 students.

Here are some guidelines for developing your own program:

One: Take an interest in all documentation that represents the program in order to make sure that the course isn't perceived as remedial. Also try to control the ways the program is represented in the department.

Two: Use the word “space” to open up the possibilities of the classroom.

Three: Discuss this language with students.

Four: Work with students in high school, do usability tests on them of the descriptive documents to see if the documents are effective.

Katherine Malcolm: “Negotiating the ‘Basics’: Theory and Practice of Error in a Mainstream Course.”
The committee chose to work with a course that was already established, 095. This course is positioned in the composition sequence within discourses of remediation. The title is "editing college writing." The course had to be something that wasn't just a quick fix for error, but they didn't want to overlook error. Placement is based on students' performance on a grammar test; this allows teacher to open up a space of dialogue about why and how the students have been placed where they are.The first document that students read is in the course description. Editing becomes a process of developing interpretations through writing. Students see the relationship between their reading, their writing, and revision. Editing is doing much more than fixing a text, but is rather making decisions about how the writer’s work is represented.  This approach helps students in all parts of the writing process.

Lisa Riecks: “The Teacher or the Tutor? Fluid Identities of the 105 Instructor.”
Riecks begins discussion with an example from the movie The Breakfast Club to discuss the fluidity of identity. The teacher of 105 has a fluid identity; what is her job: to facilitate, baby-sit, criticize? Riecks helped write the instructor policy document. The work of this class could be confused with 101 and with the writing center. How do we distinguish between these? She used these programs as models: Streamlining program at Ohio State and the Enrichment Program at CCNY.

The adjuncts teaching the class are relatively independent, so how can their work be codified? The adjuncts are often in a subordinate position in terms of hierarchy, but they might not be in terms of experience.
In an exit survey for instructors, Riecks asked how they would compare the work load between various classes. This question provoked comments about the kinds of work that instructors did. The responses focused on the planning that instructors felt they needed to do, which was extensive and exhaustive, and very individualized so that it couldn't be used again. Instructors felt huge pressure to prepare themselves because of  the 101 work; the students’ schedules; the perceived needs of the students; and the short length of time of the classes. The teachers called this emotional labor. Teachers identified themselves as planners. In response to the second question, how is this similar to other classes, they said they felt more like writing instructors than in the traditional classes because of the ability to focus more on writing context than the initial working through of a complex reading. One teacher felt unsure about how to defocus that energy. The third question asked instructors to name particular teaching practices and characterize them as those that worked and those that didn't. They said that for the most part they prepared a list of questions of class discussions. All of them, though, seemed to agree that the more they themselves participated, the less helpful the class was. Large group workshops that relied on teacher's questions were less helpful than classes that relied on small group or pair sharing. The planning didn't really help; the instructor functioned better when they functioned as mentors. The course is described as a seminar that functions as a workshop. The identity of a 105 instructor is necessarily fluid. This instructional space leads to a role that is both different from 101 teachers and writing center tutors and in some ways the same.  The identity of the adjunct course instructor must shift.
 
Aimee Krall-Lanoue: “Reconstructing Basic Writers: How Access Informs Our Assumptions about Students’ Identities.”

How are basic writers conceptualized?  Krall-Lanoue considers students’ multiple positions on the social ladder, and traces the way the pilot project outlines assumptions about basic writers. The program imagines that basic writers are participating in a collective experience rather than an individual space. It envisions basic writers as writers who negotiate the demands of language in the college. 105, the studio course, gives them an opportunity to test them out. Basic writers are envisioned as practitioners who develop ways of talking about college writing and its demands. Basic writers need to expect difficulties, but many of the demands are invisible. Basic writers are conceptualized as experienced writers who have opinions about writing. Assignments position instructors as members of the class.  These students don't see themselves as insecure or remedial. They might not see themselves as outsiders if they see themselves as participating in defining what it means to be writers at UWM. The ambiguity of how the students are seen resists easy categorizations. The category of basic is disrupted by the writers and the instructors.

Nora Bacon: “Service-learning Scholarship: Complicating the Critique”

Bacon discussed Ellen Cushman’s recent article that addressed the question of the sustainability of service-learning. How, Cushman asked, can we guarantee that we'll be around. Since sustainability is entwined with the role of the professor, Cushman argues for research that addresses community based needs and research needs. The question of sustainability is important because we need long-term relationships. The literature confirms that considering sustainability, we should be thinking about faculty. The single strongest predictor is of sustainability is faculty commitment.

Bacon argues that Cushman's argument is unconvincing; research based programs are perhaps not the best, or the only kind of program. It's important to look at Cushman’s argument because she is prominent in the field, but her work also reveals blind spots in the field. Cushman begins with a critique of an earlier piece, Writing the Community,  edited by Adler Kassner. Cushman criticizes some of the authors in this text for asking the students to undertake research programs that did not reflect academic research values. According to Bacon, this is an inaccurate critique. Cushman further suggests that dorman and dorman suggest that these researchers failed. Bacon argues that there is room for many kinds of research in service-learning. What faculty should do depends very heavily on the instructor's context. There are several models that have demonstrated sustainability. Faculty research based programs may be one way of achieving sustainability, but it's not the only way.

Adrian Wurr: “Attention to Text: Making Student Writing Central to Community-based Writing Research”

This effort recalls composition’s interest in making student writing the central part of composition programs. We should be asking how service-learning improves student writing.  More academics will be persuaded to try service-learning by demonstrations of improved writing. This is important for the field. Wurr describes a study that compares  native and nonnative students; using service-learning and non service-learning classes.

The study demonstrated that the writer's rhetorical situation influences the writing style more than the writing pedagogy; one of service-learning’s main strengths is that it can provide a strong rhetorical situation. This kind of analysis can be useful in assessing the quality of student writing in service-learning programs. We know that service-learning writing is different from traditional composition courses, but we don't know if it's better.  To find that out, we need to do wholistic assessments. In every instance in this study, the service-learning writing was judged better than that produced by the comparison section of traditional composition.

Thomas Deans: “Community-based Writing Research: A Review and a Proposal.”

We need to be paying attention to the texts that students produce, and also the writing process that students use in community based writing. What we’re seeing in CCC and CE is very good, but is mostly keyed to questions like "what should we be doing in our classrooms?" We need to widen the critical discourse on service-learning. What he doesn't see in this scholarship is what's happening with student writing in these texts. Our conversations are getting more sophisticated and critical, but they're not necessarily getting any more useful when we think about our work as writing teachers. We're so busy problematizing the service process that we're not attending to the writing process. We're so busy attending the to service outreach is that we're not paying attention to the writing process.

Those outside composition and rhetoric aren't paying attention to what we're doing, partly because they're not looking to us to make their ideological critiques more sophisticated. We can get some attention if we talk about how writers in service-learning compose. Composition researchers are uniquely qualified to do that.  Service-learning research seems to be following the same trajectory as critical pedagogy research; this is good, but we should be doing more. We're paying too much attention to students' consciousness and not enough to writing proficiency. If we can do more comparative work, we'll have some more to say about service-learning’s affect on the writing process. This is more persuasive to people who are not interested in service-learning. He hope we’ll see more of these kinds of studies: comparative studies that enact the methodologies that are valued in the larger community; ethnographic studies; and studies of the quality and nature of student writing.