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1 C r E at i o n m y t H s a n d f l a s H p o i n t s Understanding Basic Writing through Conflicted Stories Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington By now there is a well-developed literature attesting to the importance of stories—of narrative—for the development of institutional, cultural, and organizational identities. Texts from a diversity of fields, from organizational behavior and management (e.g., Brown et al. 2005) to historiography (Noble) to documentary studies (Coles) to our own field of composition (Rose, Lives on the Boundary; The Mind at Work; Ede, Situating Composition), document the power of stories to shape peoples’ understandings. This includes (but is not limited to) understandings of a number of relationships: between people and their articulation of understandings; between different ideas about a common subject; between understandings and larger issues of interest or relevance for the subject(s) under discussion. As a field, basic writing is in many ways defined by the stories that researchers, teachers, and institutions have told about teachers and the students that populate basic writing classes. These stories are located not only in the anecdotes shared at conferences, on e-mail discussion lists, or in teacher lounges, but also in the scholarship of basic writing itself. Scholarship, as well as public discussions in the news and among policy makers, promotes narratives about students and teachers. Academic studies depend on assumptions about the roles students and teachers play, their motivations, and their backgrounds. To understand the scholarship, we must understand the narratives the scholarship conveys. Student placement, for instance, extends from (and tends to perpetuate ) a combination of narratives about what literacies they should have developed before arriving at college and what they will be expected to do upon arrival. The content of basic writing courses tends to reflect stories about what students should know to be ready for “regular” 14 Ex P LORI N G C OM P OSI T I ON ST U D I ES composition classes (just as the content of first-year composition more generally tends to reflect stories about what students should know to succeed in more advanced courses across campus). The relationships between definitions of basic writing and basic writers, institutional contexts , and local systems (such as placement and classes) are themselves situated within broader narratives about the purpose of higher education in American culture. In some situations and circumstances, these identity-forming narratives are relatively stable. When they are connected to basic writing, however, they are considerably less so. Reviewing the literature in basic writing published in the last thirty years reveals a series of break points in stories that have been told about students, instructors, and the purpose of basic writing classes. At each of these points, there is tension in the scholarship about the narrative of basic writing, and these tensions have considerable consequence for the field’s very meaning. Basic writing , however defined and however situated, is always a political act, and the stories that shape it have significant implications for students, the institutions they attend, and the culture(s) in which those students participate and, ideally, make greater contributions to once they graduate. Here, we focus on two overarching themes in basic writing that reverberate in these break points: political sensitivities and origin myths. Specifically, we examine three moments of tension around stories that are seen as central to basic writing’s identity and purpose: the discussion , in the early 1990s, about Mina Shaughnessy’s work as a founding figure and icon in basic writing; the debate, from the early 1970s forward, about the purpose of basic writing and the movement toward mainstreaming efforts; and recent revisions to the presumed history and origins of basic writing. Each of these moments of tension addresses the fundamental nature of the field, and thus the study of these moments provides a comprehensive overview of the themes that have driven basic writing forward. For a more exhaustive summary of individual works in the field, we refer readers to Laura Gray-Rosendale’s Rethinking Basic Writing; our own Basic Writing as a Political Act; and Kelly Ritter’s Before Shaughnessy. We focus here on these break points in order to provide a framework for understanding key moments in the movement of conceptions of students, instructors, and programs that extend from the notion of “basic writer” and “basic writing.” As we look at basic writing through these particular moments in time, we emphasize the...

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