Though practitioners in Basic Writing studies often refer to "the politics of remediation," there are few pedagogical models that address how to teach this facet of professional life to graduate students and emerging professionals. Most often, this knowledge is transmitted through storytelling, namely narrative-based accounts of Basic…

Structural practices used by community colleges to assess, place, and teach students are undergoing transformation. Many recent changes have been shaped by the idea that barriers to success, combined with traditional policies, work against helping students pass through the developmental writing pathway. This article's purpose was to investigate…

This is the second iteration of the Developmental Education Radar Screen project. As with the first iteration, in 2011, the author uses a "radar screen" metaphor to discuss trends in developmental education based on responses to a series of topics and categories provided by a group of leaders in the educational field. The purpose of this…

This article challenges faculty members and administrators to rethink current definitions of remediation. First year college students are increasingly placed into basic writing courses due to a perceived inability to use English grammar correctly, but it must be acknowledged that all students will encounter the need for remediation as they attempt…

This article explores one basic writer's evolution as he moves from the lowest level of developmental English at a community college to graduate with a Bachelor's degree. Combining personal narrative, essay excerpts, and textual analysis, this piece aims to expand the borders of scholarship in composition studies to include basic writers as…

Mina Shaughnessy continues to exert powerful influences over Basic Writing practices, discourses and pedagogy thirty-five years after her death: Basic Writing remains in some ways trapped by Shaughnessy's legacy in what Min-Zhan Lu labeled as essentialism, accommodationism and linguistic innocence. High-stakes writing tests, a troubling hallmark…

In this article, we assess the status of basic writing early in the twenty-first century. Beginning with a discussion of the attacks on BW that intensified during the 1990s and early 2000s--attacks that originated from such diverse sources as state legislatures, university officials, and BW scholars themselves--we go on to summarize the responses…

This ethnographic narrative employs a neo-Vygotskian perspective (Holland et al.) to examine how, in the setting of a remedial ESL program at a public two-year college in North Georgia, the subject position of an ESL basic writing instructor was mediated by her understandings of and engagement with the multiple and interactive contexts of her…

When scholars write about their research in writing programs' archives, they often face the ethical question of whether to name the administrators who were involved in documents. The author identifies and provides examples of three basic orientations to this issue, which he calls overt-historical, covert-qualitative, and hybrid-institutional.…

Explores how insights of the 1970s are being lost, namely, those about why and how the academy thinks about basic writing and students deemed "illiterate" or "remedial." Examines a discourse that the author calls Basic Writing and how it has marginalized basic writing courses, teachers, and students. (TB)

Background/Context: Twenty percent of first-year students in public 4-year institutions and 42% of first-year students in public 2-year institutions in the United States enroll in remedial courses. Yet despite widespread remediation across U.S. colleges and universities, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about how remedial courses develop…

Uses the University of Washington as a case study illustrating the double bind basic writing programs are caught up in at public research institutions on the West Coast. Claims the university's Educational Opportunity Program writing sequence is at risk in the face of the anti-affirmative action movement, Initiative 200. (NH)

Argues that basic writing students need incremental assignment sequences to experience success in writing and to develop their abilities to write about abstract concepts. Describes a four-part sequence of writing assignments moving from observing to narrowing to generalizing to theorizing. (RS)

Reviews an instructional strategy for remedial writers which consists of four steps: identifying a strategy worth teaching; introducing the strategy by modeling it; helping students to try it out with workshop-style teaching guidance; and then, helping students to work toward independent mastery. (TB)

Traces the uses of the "urban mission" trope both nationally and locally as it pertains to the history of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Educational Assistance Program. Maintains that educational histories are important because they explain how political dynamics determine who will be basic writers and how many will appear…