By challenging misconceptions about students and instructors at two-year campuses, this article critically examines practices of knowledge making in writing studies, arguing for the repositioning of writing instruction at two-year and open-admissions colleges from the margins to the center of the profession.

This article examines Yale's "Awkward Squad" of "basic" writers between 1920 and 1960. Using archival materials that illustrate the socioeconomic conditions of this early, "pre-Shaughnessy" site of remedial writing instruction, I argue for a re-definition of "basic" in composition studies using local, institutional values rather than generic…

This essay analyzes the ways in which subtly but powerfully racist ideologies of language and literacy shaped the institutional development of one writing program for "high-risk" African American college students during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It further theorizes the value of such institutional analysis for counteracting racism…

Explains the City University of New York's reversal of its 1970 Open Admissions Policy and discusses the ramifications of that reversal. (NH)

Comments on the disadvantages facing writing teachers in open admissions colleges. (RB)

College teacher gives techniques 'to restore the students' natural appreciation of sound, rhyme, rhythm, imagery, and imaginative ideas. (Author/SP)

Examines the long and conflicted history of the writing center. Argues that it is paradoxically the very marginality of the writing center that offers its workers the chance to serve not simply in a regulatory or supplemental fashion, but also to begin to form alternative and perhaps even liberatory modes of teaching. (SR)

Describes four stages the traditionally prepared teacher goes through in learning to teach in the open-admissions classroom. (DD)

Liberal arts teachers must serve culture as well as credentialism, so that open-admissions does not mean a lowering of standards. (JH)

Considers writing instruction in open-admissions sites as central to the historical formation and continuing practice of composition studies. Interviews compositionists at open-admissions institutions, showing how they put students' acts of reading and writing at the center of their disciplinary practice, and regard the teaching of first-year…