The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education

CHAPTER 11: “Below Acceptable Levels”

C H A P T E R 1 1 “Below Acceptable Levels” Too many students enter UC, move through the curriculum, and graduate with writing skills that fall below acceptable levels. Office of the President, Review of the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, University Committee on Educational Policy, and University Committee on Preparatory Education Reports on the Subject A Requirement, September 30, 2002. UC Berkeley Library Archives. In 1995, Hull succeeded Arthur Quinn as College Writing Programs director , and immediately began her considerable efforts to move composition instruction in from the periphery of the academy. During her four years as director, she guided a succession of proposals for upper-division writing courses through a chilly and occasionally hostile course-approval procedure. Course approval is, and should be, a rigorous process of examination both of the course content and of the sponsoring unit’s capacity to offer appropriate instruction. Course approval for these particular upperdivision writing courses, however, entailed invoking the rhetoric of remediation ; questions were raised as to the capacity of “Subject A staff” to teach advanced students, as well as to the College Writing Programs’ capacity to enter into the mainstream of course offerings at UC Berkeley. The campus might have done away with the construct of the conditioned student , but it clung to the concept of “conditioning.” This time, it was the instructors who were facing conditioning, rather than the students.| 133 | Hull and the College Writing faculty persisted, however, and, with solid support from the Division of Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies, they prevailed. Four upper-division courses eventually gained Academic Senate approval. A graduate-level training course for graduate assistant instructors was approved, and it quickly expanded to welcome graduate students hired to teach reading and composition courses in various departments . Additionally, the programs developed a course to train graduate student instructors to work with student writers whose first language is not English. These were very considerable accomplishments. Two years into her tenancy in the director’s office, Hull made a strenuous attempt to enhance the College Writing Programs’ status and to broaden its portfolio. In 1997, she chaired the UC Berkeley Task Force on Upper Division Writing. This task force carried the robust recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee even further. The 1997 report insisted: The College Writing Programs should be at the center of writing instruction on the Berkeley campus, offering an institutional home and a driving force for various writing-improvement initiatives, such as providing the training in pedagogy for all GSIs assigned to teach composition courses, establishing an award for distinction in writing among undergraduates, and chartering a writing minor.₁ The fate of these three initiatives is instructive in the story of the devolution of the remedial role onto the College Writing Programs: today, twelve years later, the College Writing Programs does indeed provide training in pedagogy for a large number of the campus’s graduate student instructors hired to teach composition. The creative writing minor has been established under the aegis of the Division of Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies. However, the upper-division courses of the College Writing Programs are notably absent from the list of courses judged worthy of credit toward the minor. The coordinator of the writing minor does entertain petitions from individual students to have a College Writing Programs course count toward the minor, but each such request entails something of a miniature course-approval process. The coordinator of the minor evaluates the course materials used that semester and the suitability of the instructor who taught the course. The College Writing Programs ’ course, and the instructor are, in a word, conditioned. “Below Acceptable Levels”| 134 | In terms of the goal of moving the College Writing Programs to the center of writing instruction at Berkeley, the most important recommendation of the 1997 task force was its vision of the College Writing Programs as facilitating the development of a range of discipline-specific upper-division writing courses. With regard to the importance of such specialized upper-division writing courses, Hull’s committee, like the committees before hers, pressed the point that all writing is developmental: Our review of recent theory and best practices in composition makes clear [that] writing skills develop over time; they atrophy without use; and a lower-division writing sequence can’t bear the entire burden of teaching the specialized conventions associated with different genres, professions, and disciplines.² In its recommendations that writing instruction...