Transcript
- 1. Basic Writers
Then and Now
2. Presented by:
Sandee Masterson
In partial fulfillment of the course English 571
3. Education
It All Began Here
4. Basic Writers
The Students we serve
The Programs
The Politics
5. ThE Students we Serve
Who is a Basic Writer?
They are the students sitting in our classrooms, the returning
college
students after years of absence, the culturally, economically
disadvantaged and English language learnersand maybe you.
Define Basic Writers
- The best definition :The underdevelopment of literacy skills
never
presented to the student (emphasis added) (Ritters)or minimal
exposure to the skills that will be required at the college level
that will put
put students at a disadvantage in the academic arena.
What they are not-- They are not quitters.
Instead, they are like boxers who are bleeding and winded but not
yet
ready to quit. (Ritters)
6. The Programs The Old Way
Classrooms were small but inviting.Everyone knew each other and
they were a community a family.
The days were few (sometimes only 12 weeks in a school year) and
filled with rote memorization, spelling words on a chalk slate and
a few arithmetic problems.
Most students entire education was complete by the age of 15,
consisted of spelling and handwriting skills, and a simple exposure
to works of literacy in the historic discipline or classical
rudimentary introductions and mathematics in the most basic of
forms.
she started school at a time when Wisconsin required only that
young people ages seven to fifteen attend a local grammar school
for twelve weeks a year. .She remembers a home with few books and
little paper, and she said she would have had no reason to write as
a girl except to compose an occasional story assigned by her
teacher.(Brandt)
7. The Programs Out with the old In with the new
We may have had feeble beginnings in one-room schoolhouses but
education today is a super-highway with super demands on its
learners.Those who step onto its asphalt without proper footwear
will get burned.Too many of our students are without shoes or have
holes in the soles.
Not even elites of the past have encountered the current contexts
in which literacy in its
many forms is being practiced and learned. (Brandt)
Literacy is constantly changing and developing, yet always
connected to the experiences of the past while forging new highways
and blazing new trails.Our students must be able to keep up.
So, whats an educator to do?How can we make sure theyre ready to
tread on the super highway of academics, across the lanes of
various disciplines and foreshadows of todays demands?
8. What We CanDo.
So, in this high pressure, high-stake world of education, do you
ever feel like your students just arent going to make it?
First of all, be realistic.Our BWs arent at the academic level of
scholarly language thats requiredWe all know that.They will make
elementary mistakes.Their conventions of community and variance of
disciplines lack authorship.The students essays are evidence of a
discourse that lies between these two hypothetical poles.The
writing is limited as much by a students ability to imagine what
might be said as it is by cognitive control strategies.
(Bartholomae)
Our concentration must remain on developing skills that will
entreat higher-level interpretative thinking while embracing
rudimentary attempts at conveyance. One response to the problems of
basic writers, then would be to determine just what the communitys
conventions are, so that those conventions could be written out,
demystified and taught in our classrooms. (Bartholomae)
We must keep the bar raised high (just beyond the chin) without
raising it over their heads.
9. Each of us must ask ourselves Why School, in particular, our
school?Do we believe theres a place for BWs at our school?Are we
willing to stand up for them?Just what do we believe?
I can only tell you what Ive heard or read.In the first school
rooms (those with about 15 students, a pot-belly stove, chalk and
chalkboard and memorization as the mainstay of education) were the
first Basic Writers.In those classrooms were students of all ages
and all levels of development.Teachers met diversified learners all
day long, every day and reached them where they were.Indeed, the
largest problem facing the basic writing studentof past and
present, at any institutionis the inability to be socially and
intellectually integrated.(Ritter)
Sometimes we think of Basic Writers as a newly coined phrase,
whenin fact, its been around since the early days of the
frontier.Do we think we can excuse ourselves from the education of
our most desperate students? It is a terrible thing that so many
studentsespecially those from poorer backgroundscome to college
unprepared.But colleges cant fold their arms in a huff and try to
pull away from the problem.They are embedded in the social and
educational surround. (Rose)
The Politics
10. In Closing
Choosing to educate and teach Basic Writers is a choice and a
decision, one not much without the other.You might choose to teach
BWs but with it comes a decision to hold them up when they stumble,
to believe in them when they no longer believe in themselves and to
decide that you will work as hard as they to overcome the
disadvantages that have held them back.
As a teacher, I am vigorous in the expectations of myself to
develop sound practices and knowledgeable lessons that will address
the intelligence of their mistakes (Shaughnessy)
As a human being, I will fight to see the equalization of
educational goals for my students and the remediation of the
systemsfailure.
Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or
modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and
the power it carries with it. (Foucault)
11. Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the Universitry." Miller, Susan. The
Norton Book of Composition Studies. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2009. 605-629.
Brandt, Deborah. Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing,
Reading, and Society. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons Inc.,
2009.
Foucault. "The Discovery on Language." Miller, Susan. The Norton
Book of Composition Studies. New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
209. 605.
Ritter, Kelly. "Before Mina Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale,
1920-1960." CCC (2008): 1-28.
Rose, Mike. Why School. New York: The New Press, 2009.
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