Basic Writing Assignments and Pop Culture Studies Laura Gray-Rosendale Northern Arizona University

The Sticky Business of Our Jobs

As teachers of Basic Writers we often feel pressure from our home institutions, administrators, state legislatures, colleagues, and even the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition to teach our students certain limited things in certain limited ways. While we might give these ideas different names, the bulk of us often find ourselves teaching our students about critical thinking, reading, and writing, close analysis, and argumentation along with process, grammar skills, and the like. Additionally, we often find ourselves teaching them fundamental organizational concepts about how to hierarchize their ideas and come up with main concepts.

However, for many of us, resting at the level of skills-building just does not feel like quite enough. We find ourselves constantly being faced with political questions for which there seem to be no easy answers— Can we teach traditional standard argumentative modes and not overwrite our students’ native literacies? If we teach our students these traditional modes and do not give them the tools to critique these modes, will our students feel silenced, and will we simply be creating a passive workforce (the Freirian concept of “banking education”)? [1] If we teach only modes of critique and analysis in our classes, however, are we not in danger of forcing our own political agendas on our students? And, isn’t this possibility as potentially bad, if not worse, since our various attempts to give our students voice may do little more than privilege our own voices as the legislators of what politics should be?

Potential Approaches and Pitfalls

Struggling with these complex questions, we often stumble in the dark. Many of us have tried various ways over the years to connect with our Basic Writing students, to allow students the chance to fulfill assignments that have meaning for them, assignments that are not disconnected from the other worlds in which our students travel on a daily basis, assignments to which they can connect and about which they feel passionate.

As a teacher of Basic Writing students and an administrator of such programs I have worked over the years to discover useful approaches. At times I have brought multiethnic literature into my Basic Writing classroom, literary texts that confront issues of racism, ethnocentrism, classism, and gender inequities. Many of my students found this kind of reading empowering, though other students, particularly my more conservative students, may have felt that it was too “in your face.” And, both reactions have been very important for me to think about more. I have also focused on literacy autobiographies in an effort to begin with student voices to jumpstart students’ own argumentative claims and arguments. Students tended to find the opportunity to develop their own voices to be captivating and fun. But for some it was hard to make the leap from writing about personal issues with passion to writing about larger social or cultural issues with the same feelings and voices of expertise.

Basic Writing Students as Experts of the Everyday

While I have found both approaches mentioned above to be effective, lately I have turned toward popular culture as starting point for teaching critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Why did I do this? Many of the students I was encountering had tremendous oral skills and tools around visual literacy. However, they lacked confidence and practice as writers. While my students could talk about Eminem with a feeling of authority, when it came time to describe themselves as writers they were at a loss. They were not writers, they told me over and over again. They had few or no analytical skills, they said. And, yet when I asked them to offer analyses of Eminem’s videos and lyrics, they came alive. They could not stop talking, debating each other, making cogent arguments about their claims, and offering critical readings. When I would then have them do an in-class writing assignment based upon their analyses of Eminem’s lyrics and videos, the writing I received had a level of poise, confidence, authority, and even logic that was sometimes missing from their other written pieces. This led me to consider the following question: How could I combine my sense of what skills my students were expected to have with their clear expertise in visual rhetorics?

The Beginnings of An Alternative Approach

These experiences led me to overhaul the summer bridge course for the program I direct, STAR (Successful Transition and Readiness Program). I decided that the best way to reach students in this program was to start where my students lived—in a world where visual literacy was not only valued but was a necessary form of their everyday lives. While such courses often serve as the foundation to majors in Mass Communication or Political Science or even English Studies, I wanted to make the reading of and writing about popular cultural texts to be part of a composition bridge course. As I tried out this curriculum and received feedback from all involved, pop culture did not become just a hook used just to draw in students (though they have at times gotten hooked on this kind of work in the process). Rather, pop culture readily became the backbone of expertise upon which we could build other kinds of expertise.

The students in this program come from diverse cultural backgrounds, struggle economically, and/or  are first generation college. Some of the students have superb writing and critical thinking skills while others are completely unfamiliar with writing papers in school settings. As a result, the teachers in my program are teaching to “Basic Writers” alongside students who may not be struggling nearly as much. Some of our students come from urban environments—Phoenix, Tuscon— while some come from rural environments, including the area reservations— Yuma or Globe, Arizona.

While the curriculum I created cannot help but be informed by my own knowledge and interest in Cultural Studies, feminist theory, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, ethnicity studies, and the like, I do not make any of these frameworks a part of the course itself. Instead, the curriculum encourages students to make their own analytical and argumentative claims about how pop culture texts work, to what ends, and why. As a result, students sometimes end up making critiques of television shows, for example, that are based in their own thoughts on gender analyses. However, just as likely, students may also make positive claims about television shows based on cultural analyses. The claims they make are entirely their own. Students learn, though, that if they are going to make claims, they must be supportable through close analyses of the cultural texts. This leads students to hold themselves to making more specific claims, to backing up their views, and to requiring their peers in class to do the same.

Assignments and Reading Strategies

In this curriculum students complete a series of short, informal writing assignments~ a Writer’s Profile (in which they write a bit about themselves as writers and people) as well as analyses of readings for class and various other cultural texts (television shows, films, advertisements, radio shows, murals). They also read a series of texts that offer cultural criticisms on rap music, print ads, commercials, films, and television shows.

The students then write two formal paper assignments. The first involves offering a tentative argumentative claim about a reading that they have done for class and supporting their claim with close analyses. The second involves making an argument about a cultural text of their own choosing and supporting this with close readings from the text.

The rest of the teachers and I have found that the first assignment prepares students well for close analyses of texts and rudimentary argument-making. The second paper helps them to put their skills to work in an extended way around a cultural text of their choosing.

Questions for Discussion

I think there are lots of issues that we might take up here. So, feel free to offer some other possibilities. But here are a few things to get us started…

      What techniques, strategies, and assignments have you used in your classroom to engage your students? What responses did your students give you? What did you learn from these experiences and how did your course and assignments change as a result?

      Have you ever used popular cultural texts as a part of your Basic Writing courses? What purposes have these served? When have you found this approach to be useful and why? When has this approach backfired and why?

      What kinds of reading and writing assignments might we in the future or have we already built around these kinds of everyday texts? What sorts of skills are these linked to for our students?