We present 11 evidence-based practices for teaching writing to students. These include recommendations for teaching writing to younger students (aged 5-11) and older students (aged 6-18). The recommendations are based on findings from close to 1000 investigations. The proposed recommendations are (1) students need to write, but writing is not…

We present 11 evidence-based practices for teaching writing to students. These include recommendations for teaching writing to younger students (aged 5-11) and older students (aged 6-18). The recommendations are based on findings from close to 1000 investigations. The proposed recommendations are: (1) students need to write, but writing is not…

In this archival history, a college writing teacher and recent graduate together challenge the integrationist narrative of Basic Writing, grounded in "white innocence" and dating back to the 1970s. Joining other studies of physical and linguistic segregation in higher education, we recover the true birth of Basic Writing from 1969 to…

The Dada and Surrealist movements are known for producing work that challenges reader-viewers' perceptions of reality. These movements also prompted creators to experiment with unexpected mediums and materials, and this can be seen through the intersection of visual art and writing. This essay emphasizes the importance of an interdisciplinary…

If assessment is about improving learning and facilitating better teaching through research and helping students learn what higher education purports to value, then the often-invisible institutional barriers that do not always embrace the ways in which classroom assessment can teach an institution about student learning within individual…

The authors discuss their process of actively working to generate interest among graduate students and faculty to change approaches to Basic Writing pedagogy, emphasizing personal writing and antiracist pedagogies at College of Staten Island CUNY, a large public university. The authors argue that master's level coursework and faculty professional…

This essay describes Open Admissions in the South during postsecondary desegregation, providing a comparative analysis of policies and debates in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Georgia. Statewide Open Admissions policies emerged in the 1960s as part of superficial efforts to comply with desegregation but were ineffective; consequently, they were…

Since the 1970s, legacy Basic Writing systems have survived despite growing resistance grounded in an increasing awareness of their troubling roots and harmful effects. In this article, two 2017 basic writing students and their teacher conduct a mixed-method "postmortem" examination of the now eliminated zero-credit course and writing…

This narrative essay describes a basic writing instructor's engagement with student confusion in a hybrid Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) course. The story examines the ways confusion can mark sites of engagement for students and teachers and how ALP courses, in particular, might mediate effective (and ineffective) forms of confusion.

The question of who is the basic writer threads the history of Basic Writing, characterizing many disciplinary tensions and concerns. When traced to Basic Writing's beginnings as part of open admissions at CUNY, the question often links to Shaughnessy's "Errors and Expectations" as a telling of basic writers' language deficiencies. This…

Dominant narratives of disciplinarity that WAC/WID confronts conflate disciplines with departments and material institutional structures, such as departments and professional organizations--what is here called "departmentality." The relative autonomy of disciplinarity from departmentality means that challenges to foundational concepts of…

For this essay, the authors provide an "introspective retrospective." A senior scholar of basic writing provides his views on the development of basic writing as one who began graduate school in rhetoric and composition two years after Mina Shaughnessy's 1977 Errors and Expectations. That perspective carries us through the discussions…

This article uses Zak Lancaster's 2016 discovery that academics do not actually write the way "They Say/I Say" says they do to reflect on relations between, on the one hand, facts about academic writing and, on the other, the pedagogical values that underlie and guide those facts--or, put another way, to reflect on how values we may…

In this essay, I examine the sociopolitical consequences of policing plagiarism and evaluating students' ethics within the context of basic writing's longstanding tradition of remediating and reshaping pedagogies, ideological stances, and what counts as academic writing. With the hope of illustrating how we might be more intentional about…

I revisit the so-called Illinois Decision of 1955, which eliminated basic writing from the University of Illinois Rhetoric Program and caused a chain of similar programmatic actions on other campuses nationwide. I contend that reviewing and archiving the Illinois Decision as a locally specific act with multiple actors besides WPA Charles Roberts…