This article heeds Susan Naomi Bernstein's call for an "embodied epistemology" for Basic Writing. In the wake of recent economic and health crises as well as the ongoing effects of neoliberal reform efforts at the two-year college, a materialist, embodied orientation for critical practitioners within two-year colleges is more necessary…

This article investigates a Basic Writing program shared between a University of California campus and a local community college in which the curriculum, assessment practices, and larger programmatic structures were heavily influenced by an exit exam modeled after the UC system's Analytical Writing Placement Exam (AWPE). Drawing from scholarship…

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…

Despite the push for all institutions of higher learning to embrace a corequisite model for writing instruction, there is limited evidence that suggests this model is desirable for all students. This study seeks to expand our understanding of the characteristics of students enrolled in Basic Writing at a 4-year comprehensive university, and the…

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…

In the hopes of deepening Basic Writing instructors' critical awareness of their authority in assigning meaning to student experience, we present a case study of two adult-arrival immigrant students. We explore the ways that writing instructors and tutors encourage students' personal narratives of persistence--rather than actual persistence…

As the cost of college tuition continues to soar, community colleges and state and local governments offer a wide range of access and opportunity programs to best serve low-income and academically underprepared students. In this article, I present a case study of two instructors, both of whom regularly teach Basic Writing courses at the community…

This essay, in letter form, introduces graduate-level study in Basic Writing to practicum students. It situates teaching practices within Basic Writing histories and pedagogies, and invites readers to focus widely, read deeply, and keep writing. Included are lessons from Bernstein's experiences in presenting David Bowie's artistic and cultural…

This article describes a version of the Seminar in Basic Writing Theory and Pedagogy, a Master's level course that Marcia Buell taught in summer 2017 at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Buell argues that because many MA students enter graduate courses in Basic Writing expecting that the course will show them how to "fix"…

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 explores the pedagogical implications of translingualism by offering writing theory cartoon as a pedagogical tool to support basic writers' development of translingual dispositions. In a curriculum that challenges the supremacy of standard English over other languages and modalities, this assignment supports basic, multilingual…

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…

This essay provides a profile of an interdisciplinary master's program whose curriculum supports current and future adult educators seeking employment opportunities in higher education, adult literacy education, adult English language instruction, writing centers, and secondary education. A faculty administrator and five former graduate students…