Basic Writing (review)

Radical teachers know that history is a dialogue between the present and the past: writers of history do not merely report a set of staid narrative situations, but question their ongoing and ever-changing implications as well. As the historian James McPherson explains, “Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time.” This type of history-making resonates with the pedagogical values of all instructors who want students to engage in dialogue and response as a means to arrive at new questions, evidence, and perspectives. If the recounting of history spurs recursive hindsight for the purposes of forward thinking, Basic Writing by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk offers a platform of productive dialogues and innovative questions to propel new conversations about the subject of the book’s title.

By reviewing how basic writing has evolved over the past five decades, Otte and Mlynarczyk compile the joint knowledge of two editors of the Journal of Basic Writing (JBW)—one former and the other current—to explain the history of this sub-field and also to explicate the continuously changing definition of the basic writer as the term transforms through decades, institutions, and literacy crises. While they locate much of their story at the City University of New York (CUNY)—“the cradle of open admissions”(69)—their historical accounts reverberate to public opinions and public policies across the nation. Drawing on the publications of JBW, their contact with basic writing instructors and scholars, and their experiences at CUNY, Otte and Mlynarczyk preserve the “ongoing story of basic writing in America” (xvii–xviii). Their book offers an historical overview of the field, its instructional practices and research, its possible future (or disappearance) in the educational arena, and the varying definitions of basic writers. As historians of basic writing, these two scholars have the chronological facts to restage these events and the interpretive insights to frame the lessons that we should learn from them.

Basic Writing illustrates how the presence of the basic writer has shifted the identity of Academia, compelling educators to rethink issues such as educational accessibility, student/teacher roles, and the hierarchal structures of institutions. Although remediation and developmental students often remain at the periphery of academic institutions, they find themselves at the center of heated political discourse occurring in English departments, faculty senates, administrative offices, and board rooms. While proponents of basic writing argue on the side of educational opportunity and its social justice, opponents contest whether underprepared undergraduates belong in college at all. Basic Writing describes the recurrence of these debates during shifting moments of economics, political influence, and public opinion. We see that race, class, gender, (dis)ability, and labor issues bubble beneath the very surface of these educational struggles. These non-traditional students with unconventional needs (often instructed exclusively by adjunct labor) focus our attentions on the most contested issues that face universities today.

Even within the field of composition, basic writing has become a contested subject. If proponents of basic writing saw their work as pedagogical activism, offering the disenfranchised a wider range of social opportunities, its critics likewise saw it as a way to “other” them (33, 59) or contain them in a type of curricular apartheid (169). The authors of Basic Writing reveal that the viewpoints about basic writing are complex, nuanced, and contested—even among the most liberal and radical who have addressed them.

For graduate students, informed instructors, and intellectual bureaucrats, Basic Writing provides the necessary foundation to comprehend the historical and political landscape of one of the most volatile subjects of higher education—namely, literacy acquisition and writing instruction. While we do not identify all students as basic writers, we frequently identify (and lament) the problems that students have expressing themselves as writers. With the onslaught of technological advancement in the twenty-first century, the accumulation of literacy aptitudes piles up heavily on the traditional literacies of reading and writing, intensifying their importance yet shifting their significance...