Argues that Mina Shaughnessy's view of language as a politically innocent vehicle of meaning overlooks basic writers' need to confront the dissonance they experience between academic and other discourses. Suggests educators need to abandon the limitations of the essentialist view of language informing their pedagogy. (KEH)

This article examines some of the tensions and contradictions between the process-oriented, learning-centered pedagogy commonly associated with basic writing and the product-based, performance-centered moment mandated by writing-for-the-community varieties of service learning. Because end-of-term "writing-for" projects cannot provide students with…

Viewing writing as a way to heal wounds and even reconstruct past experiences also helps heal the composition discipline's dichotomy between the academic and the personal, the self and the institution. Academicians are not the only writers undermined by this perceived separation: most incoming university students, in particular basic writers,…

Arranged chronologically, the essays in this book trace the attempts of one writing teacher (Patricia Bizzell) to understand theoretically--and to respond pedagogically--to what happens when students from diverse backgrounds learn to use language in college. Over the 10-year period chronicled in the essays that make up the book, the teacher sees…

In this description of a learning community for "at-risk" and basic writing students at the University of Wyoming, I outline the reasons our students resist academic writing prior to their entry into college--reasons largely unrelated to typical perceptions of at-risk students as "lazy" or intellectually less capable. For…

If personal writing empowers students to hear their own voices and to "see themselves as writers," then personal writing has value for basic writing students, whose voices have tended to be silenced and who see themselves as anything but writers. From hearing their voices in writing, and from identifying multiple sources and rhetorical…

Stretch 107 is a version of English 107 (a first-year composition course for international students at Arizona State University), designed to provide those with low proficiency in English with various strategies for writing acceptable prose in English. Since it is a 2-semester course, Stretch 107 gives students more time to work on their…