1. Basic Writers
Then and Now

2. Presented by:
Sandee Masterson
In partial fulfillment of the course English 571
3. Education
It All Began Here
4. Basic Writers
The Students we serve
The Programs
The Politics
5. ThE Students we Serve
Who is a Basic Writer?
They are the students sitting in our classrooms, the returning college
students after years of absence, the culturally, economically
disadvantaged and English language learnersand maybe you.
Define Basic Writers
- The best definition :The underdevelopment of literacy skills never
presented to the student (emphasis added) (Ritters)or minimal
exposure to the skills that will be required at the college level that will put
put students at a disadvantage in the academic arena.
What they are not-- They are not quitters.
Instead, they are like boxers who are bleeding and winded but not yet
ready to quit. (Ritters)
6. The Programs The Old Way
Classrooms were small but inviting.Everyone knew each other and they were a community a family.
The days were few (sometimes only 12 weeks in a school year) and filled with rote memorization, spelling words on a chalk slate and a few arithmetic problems.
Most students entire education was complete by the age of 15, consisted of spelling and handwriting skills, and a simple exposure to works of literacy in the historic discipline or classical rudimentary introductions and mathematics in the most basic of forms.
she started school at a time when Wisconsin required only that young people ages seven to fifteen attend a local grammar school for twelve weeks a year. .She remembers a home with few books and little paper, and she said she would have had no reason to write as a girl except to compose an occasional story assigned by her teacher.(Brandt)
7. The Programs Out with the old In with the new
We may have had feeble beginnings in one-room schoolhouses but education today is a super-highway with super demands on its learners.Those who step onto its asphalt without proper footwear will get burned.Too many of our students are without shoes or have holes in the soles.
Not even elites of the past have encountered the current contexts in which literacy in its
many forms is being practiced and learned. (Brandt)
Literacy is constantly changing and developing, yet always connected to the experiences of the past while forging new highways and blazing new trails.Our students must be able to keep up.
So, whats an educator to do?How can we make sure theyre ready to tread on the super highway of academics, across the lanes of various disciplines and foreshadows of todays demands?
8. What We CanDo.
So, in this high pressure, high-stake world of education, do you ever feel like your students just arent going to make it?
First of all, be realistic.Our BWs arent at the academic level of scholarly language thats requiredWe all know that.They will make elementary mistakes.Their conventions of community and variance of disciplines lack authorship.The students essays are evidence of a discourse that lies between these two hypothetical poles.The writing is limited as much by a students ability to imagine what might be said as it is by cognitive control strategies. (Bartholomae)
Our concentration must remain on developing skills that will entreat higher-level interpretative thinking while embracing rudimentary attempts at conveyance. One response to the problems of basic writers, then would be to determine just what the communitys conventions are, so that those conventions could be written out, demystified and taught in our classrooms. (Bartholomae)
We must keep the bar raised high (just beyond the chin) without raising it over their heads.
9. Each of us must ask ourselves Why School, in particular, our school?Do we believe theres a place for BWs at our school?Are we willing to stand up for them?Just what do we believe?
I can only tell you what Ive heard or read.In the first school rooms (those with about 15 students, a pot-belly stove, chalk and chalkboard and memorization as the mainstay of education) were the first Basic Writers.In those classrooms were students of all ages and all levels of development.Teachers met diversified learners all day long, every day and reached them where they were.Indeed, the largest problem facing the basic writing studentof past and present, at any institutionis the inability to be socially and intellectually integrated.(Ritter)
Sometimes we think of Basic Writers as a newly coined phrase, whenin fact, its been around since the early days of the frontier.Do we think we can excuse ourselves from the education of our most desperate students? It is a terrible thing that so many studentsespecially those from poorer backgroundscome to college unprepared.But colleges cant fold their arms in a huff and try to pull away from the problem.They are embedded in the social and educational surround. (Rose)
The Politics
10. In Closing
Choosing to educate and teach Basic Writers is a choice and a decision, one not much without the other.You might choose to teach BWs but with it comes a decision to hold them up when they stumble, to believe in them when they no longer believe in themselves and to decide that you will work as hard as they to overcome the disadvantages that have held them back.
As a teacher, I am vigorous in the expectations of myself to develop sound practices and knowledgeable lessons that will address the intelligence of their mistakes (Shaughnessy)
As a human being, I will fight to see the equalization of educational goals for my students and the remediation of the systemsfailure.
Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the power it carries with it. (Foucault)
11. Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the Universitry." Miller, Susan. The Norton Book of Composition Studies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. 605-629.
Brandt, Deborah. Literacy and Learning: Reflections on Writing, Reading, and Society. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2009.
Foucault. "The Discovery on Language." Miller, Susan. The Norton Book of Composition Studies. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 209. 605.
Ritter, Kelly. "Before Mina Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale, 1920-1960." CCC (2008): 1-28.
Rose, Mike. Why School. New York: The New Press, 2009.