This essay considers the critical need for pre-service and in-service basic writing faculty to define and enact a professional identity, specifically within the context of faculty development and graduate course settings. The essay describes a graduate course in teaching basic writing offered primarily online with four in-person weekend workshops.…

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…

Close to one billion people in the world do not have basic literacy skills. A key challenge is reaching children in the midst of circumstances that make a traditional school-based approach impractical. This chapter will describe a cross-disciplinary, mobile technology approach to literacy education. The Curious Learning approach distributes…

What follows is a simple assertion: time for basic writing to get out from under, a call for us to inculcate a Basic Writing Across the Curriculum. It is time yet again to move away from the concept that basic writers are in need of remedies, in part because all composition courses are in some sense remedial, and to a greater degree because the…

In the course overview, the authors state that this course prepares those who enroll to teach Stretch and Studio Composition at the University of New Mexico by introducing relevant theory and pedagogy in the areas of basic writing, multilingual writing, metacognition, and reading instruction. While the English 537: Teaching Composition Practicum…

Against a Racial Real backdrop, I argue for consciously adopting a sociocultural approach to style in linguistically and racially diverse Basic Writing classrooms. To make this argument, I focus on a multilingual writer named Tejada, who reveals how she had internalized a racialized stereotypical discourse about herself as a minority--a discourse…

While basic writing has made a public turn by incorporating service learning and community literacy pedagogies, basic writers are not often discussed in the vast and growing research on public writing in composition studies. Scholarship on public writing in composition has produced important discussions of the outcomes of public writing pedagogy,…

This essay describes the process of reassessing our BW program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in order to cultivate a more deliberate, transparent negotiation among stakeholders toward a "transcultural ethos." Informed by Bruce Horner's argument that leading-edge work on language and language difference can take place in BW, we…

Basic writing and reading students are scared. More than the unfamiliar places, faces, new methods and serious consequences of it all, they are afraid of words. Even if they successfully complete remediation, move on to English 101 and advance to upper courses in other disciplines, our students often face monstrous texts, which they have precious…

In this essay I conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis of the language surrounding the California State University (CSU) Chancellor's Office latest plan to curb remediation, the Early Start program. I consider Early Start in the context of what I argue is the evolution of three major frameworks for Basic Writing in the CSU: the CSU Chancellor's…

This article examines two course redesigns undertaken to improve student support, learning, and retention in the basic writing program at Oakland University, a doctoral research university in southeast Michigan, where support for developmental writers has fluctuated dramatically between nurture and neglect over the past fifty years. However,…

I frame the continuing value of basic writing as part of a long tradition in composition studies challenging dominant beliefs about literacy and language abilities, and I link basic writing to emerging--e.g."translingual"--approaches to language. I identify basic writing as vital to the field of composition in its rejection of simplistic notions…

Purpose, Scope, and Method of Study: The purpose of this study was to compare student success rates in a college developmental writing course delivered in a conventional classroom to the same course using a computer-delivered model. The sample was drawn from a small, Midwestern community college. Students were enrolled in one of three sections…

While developmental education in community colleges has the potential to prepare students for college-level work, its effectiveness and need is often questioned. Further, while Latinx students are overrepresented in developmental courses, there is a dearth of literature on their experiences in such courses and how to effectively serve their needs…

The course described here was designed especially for students enrolled in a collaborative program between Texas A&M University-Commerce and Konkuk University in South Korea. This course was created specifically for students who did not earn a qualifying score on a standardized placement exam required of all first-year students for enrollment…