Developing Basic Writing Curriculum: Complicating/Uncomplicating “English”

Cori Brewster
Treasure Valley Community College
Ontario, Oregon

Like many of the folks who have posted their comments and concerns to this list over the past year, I walked into my first full-time teaching job with very little experience and only a vague notion of what "developmental writing" might mean. In the five years since, I've spent a lot of time learning - reading, talking to students, going to conferences, revising syllabi, trying things out - as I have worked to disentangle myself from the sentence-to-paragraph-to-essay approach that I inherited from the previous instructor and around which my institution's writing sequence has largely been built.

From what I have gathered in talking to other newer faculty - particularly at the community college level - my experience is not uncommon. Many of us have found ourselves in teaching situations in which we not only feel unprepared, but, worse, in which the more research we do, the greater rift we encounter between current scholarship and the texts and practices we are expected (or strongly encouraged) to adopt.

What I'd like to do with this month's module, then, is to focus on some of the real nuts and bolts issues surrounding curriculum development that many of us who are in this position face. Previous modules on this listserv have made strong cases for developing authentic rhetorical situations for writing, for designing assignments that engage a wide range of students, and for thinking carefully about our approaches to grammar instruction in basic writing classrooms. My hope is not only that we can continue building on some of these earlier discussions, but that we can draw in more of the less experienced folks lurking out there on the list and use this space to exchange ideas about specific approaches and assignments that people have tried as they have worked away from the skill-and-drill, sentence-to-paragraph approach.

Despite significant differences in our teaching situations and in the level of support we have for revising curricula, I think many of us have at least one core challenge in common: devising ways to complicate writing for (and with) our students at the same time we work to uncomplicate it. In other words, we are in the position of trying to do two somewhat contradictory things at once: providing students challenging, engaging, adult situations for writing at the same time we are attempting to "demystify" composition to some degree and help students develop a broader range of tools for thinking and talking about their work.

Direction 1: Complicating
My first term on the job I was given a syllabus that included a paragraph-length assignment titled "My Favorite Snack." Although I was hesitant to present this task to a roomful of adults, I did it. We talked about details and fragments and transitions. Then we moved on to five or six papers of the same kind until quarter's end.

As Mike Rose (1983) and many others since have argued, although these kinds of assignments provide students a less threatening place to begin writing, they are unlikely to give students much sense of progress or move students very far toward the kinds of writing expected in other college classrooms. Discussions about prewriting, planning, and revising seem almost ridiculous because students CAN plunk out something that meets the assignment criteria off the top of their head in ten minutes. Simple paragraph assignments like these neither encourage students to see writing as a place to generate new ideas nor push them to develop more complex understandings of the writing situation or the topic at hand.

In the several years since "My Favorite Snack," I have tried out increasingly more complicated - and hopefully more interesting - writing assignments in the three levels of basic writing that I teach. This term, for example, one class is researching independent media in the United States and writing about connections between language and social change. The advantages of going this route have been many: students spend much more time writing, thinking, and revising; they have more reason to develop and give examples than they did with the simple topics that seemed too obvious to require explanation; and, despite all of the griping I hear early in the quarter, the majority of students report in the end that the most difficult work we did during the term was the most satisfying and the most valuable.

The challenge in assigning these more complicated tasks, however, is trying to design assignments in such a way that students are pushed to work at the "borders of their competencies" but are not overwhelmed or unnecessarily frustrated. As one student told me this fall, the best writing assignments are the ones "that are in between. Because easy ones are not a challenge and are boring and hard ones are going to get me frustrated and I won't be able to learn."

Direction 2: Uncomplicating
At the same time we are working to provide more challenging, complicated tasks for students, then, our other major obligation is to help uncomplicate the whole mess - to help students better understand basic writing concepts, grammatical terms, grading criteria, and so on. Too many students dislike or do poorly in English classes in large part because they have no real sense of how their writing is being assessed or why. For many students, as Lynda Holmes (2001) notes in "What Do Students Mean When They Say, 'I Hate Writing'?", even the comments they do receive on their writing mean very little because they are not familiar with the terms instructors are using to respond to their work. Notes in the margin such as "clarity," "need transition," "run-on," and "evidence?", for example, do little more than frustrate students who may not even know where to look such terms up.

It's interesting, in light of this, that while much has been written about introducing students to the academic discourse community (see Bizzell, 1992, for example), little work seems to have focused directly on introducing students to the discourse community specific to composition instructors themselves. If we hope to teach "all aspects of writing, including editing," as Bruce Horner (1999) suggests, "as negotiations in which [students] can play a role…" (165), we need to think carefully when designing curricula about the language both students and instructors must possess in order to discuss students' work in a way that is meaningful to all involved.

• What types of assignments provide an appropriate level of challenge to students in your basic writing classrooms? What kinds of assignments have you tried, either successfully or not so successfully, in moving away from the simple formula-driven paragraph approach offered in so many basic writing texts? What kinds of scaffolding have you had to do with these assignments in order to avoid overwhelming or overly frustrating your students? What has worked?



• Which students do we lose by abandoning the formula-driven paragraph assignment? Which students benefit the most? How do we avoid pushing out folks with certain types of learning disabilities who really struggle with written directions and/or tasks that involve multiple steps?



• What kinds of language do composition instructors use to talk about students' writing? How much of this language do students share? Are there specific terms that students need to know and feel comfortable with in order to actively discuss their writing with peers, tutors, and instructors? What terms is it assumed that students know and understand by the time they enter first-year composition? What approaches and types of assignments best contribute to students developing a basic "vocabulary of writing"?
  

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