Rachael Shapiro

Horner, Bruce, and Min-Zhan Lu. Representing the “Other”: Basic Writers and the Teaching of Basic Writing. Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1999. Print.

Introduction: Horner and Lu

In the introduction, the authors explain their hope that the essays, taken together, help readers to understand the discourse of Basic Writing as a historical, political, and socially-situated construct that is productive rather than simply descriptive (xii). Horner and Lu acknowledge the seeming necessity in portraying a kind of unity that would strengthen its position as a recognizable discipline, writing that:

…the key terms by which this discourse establishes itself, while ensuring it a specific kind of legitimacy and authority, simultaneously isolate it from the heterogeneity of positions and forms of power in the larger discursive field. (xiii)

Their essays represent a cultural materialist reading of Basic Writing discourse that acknowledges the interests, assumptions, and consequences thereof on teachers, students, and pedagogies of BW. They articulate a very clear framework for how they understand language, subjectivity, and power (xiii-xiv), paraphrased here:

1. discourse is a material, social practice that happens among and between relations of power
2. subjectivity emerges out of conflict and shifts with each encounter
3. education is situated and constitutive
4. hegemony acts on individuals, but individuals can act in ways that transform
5. agency is real-people can work for change, but “in circumstances not of one’s choosing” (xiv)

Ultimately, they want to dodge the notions of fixity that have dominated the discourse on BW, writing that:

In one way or another, all these work to locate basic writing in history: a response to, produced and sustained by, and altering specific social and historical conditions and thus as never fixed but always provisional and strategic, continually involving individuals in renegotiating their positions and their work. (xviii)

Horner: “The ‘Birth of Basic Writing’”

Looking at the political and social circumstances out of which BW emerged during the advent of Open Admissions, Horner points out ways in which BW discourse solidified its own institutional place by silencing many conflicting material realities. While BW work had been done since the conception of composition pre-1900, the heated political conflict arising out of pressures from conservative budgetary politics and intense social activism addressed questions about the basic nature of higher education, its goals, and whom it serves. Horner points out the problematic portrayal of BW students as being primarily of color, noting that:

While the invisibility of white working-class ethnics speaks most obviously to the pervasive blindness of Americans to social class and the persistence of racism, it speaks also and more specifically to the constitutive power within and outside the academy of the public discourse linking minority students, political activism, and academic underpreparedness, a power which made invisible students who might lack both academic preparation and interest in political activism. (9)

He uncovers binaries within the rhetoric: white/of color, academic excellence/academically un(der)prepared, civil and deserving/activist and political, belonging/not welcome. He critiques E & E as it attempts to resolve the binaries, writing that:

The power of Errors and Expectations can be attributed to just such a resolution: showing how students’ errors in many ways result from those resources and this speak not to their illiteracy but their educability. At the same time, the strategy of such a resolution operates within the dominant conceptual framework on education positing the ability to be educated as a cognitive rather than political matter, and it accepts, in however qualified a manner, traditional definitions of that educability. (16)

Finally, Horner explains that the need for mediation led BW scholarship down the difficult road of the practical, noting that:

…while historically the enterprise of basic writing can be seen as foregrounding the politics of how and why one teaches, such a potential is suppressed by the quest fot the practical/realistic, which occludes attention to the political through its focus on “skills.” (21)

Lu: “Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?”

Drawing from Anzaldua’s description of the mestiza consciousness in which the pull between two lands manifests an inner conflict out of which real political agency emerges, Lu takes issue with those trends in BW scholarship in which student struggle and resistance is sought to be pacified. She identifies the essentialist view of language, and that of discourse communities, both of which “view all signs of conflict and struggle as the enemy of Basic Writing instruction” (32). Teachers with these theories of language tend to want to accomodate students by recognizing their home discourses and easing fears of distance thereof, or acculturate students by helping them move from one fixed discourse to another. Both views are short-sighted, imperialist, and ultimately silence the conflict and struggle that by rights ought to be the true source of empowerment for these students. She writes:

In short, they sustain the impression that these Experiences ought to and will disappear once the students get comfortably settled into the new community and sever or dismiss their ties with the old. Any sign of heterogeneity, uncertainty, or instability is viewed as problematic; hence conflict and struggle are the enemies of basic writing instruction. (39)

In helping students to establish deep connections with “Western culture,” teachers will promote the possibility of students’ changing their identification with “sub-cultural” views are likely to turn education into an accommodation–or mere tolerance–of the students’ choice or need to live with conflicts. This accommodation could hardly help students explore, formulate, reflect on, and enact strategies for coping actively with conflicts as the residence of borderlands do: developing “tolerance for” and an ability to “sustain” contradictions and ambiguity (Anzaldua 79). Even if teachers explicitly promote the image of “partial deracination,” they are likely to be more successful in helping students unconsciously “lower” and “fix” their roots into “Western culture” then in helping them to keep their roots from being completely “torn out” of “subcultures.” (43)

Lu: “Importing ‘Science’: Neutralizing Basic Writing”

In this article, Lu makes a thorough and complicated analysis of the impetus and consequence of BW’s reliance on sciences such as logical empiricism, the cognitive, and expressive realism, all of which work “as a means of neutralizing the politics of writing, teaching, and research at a time–the 1970s–and an educational site–the basic writing classroom–when the dominant found issues of difference and power most difficult to contain” (56). While these moves helped to establish BW programs in the face of political objection, they served equally to silence stories of real and complex struggle that might have better informed described and informed the teaching of BW.

Looking at ways in which BW scholarship has taken up writers like Burke, Freire, Bernstein, Ohmann, Labov, and Vygotsky, Lu argues that:

… the pervasive move to separate these writers’ thinking on the relations of language, subjectivity, differences, and power from their “scientific” knowledge of linguistic and cognitive structures and then to dismiss the former as “irrelevant” might likewise route Basic Writing’s venture into “science” back into an English dominated by new critical close reading. (62)

The dominance of scientism in these canonical texts indicates that composition’s venture into “science” is in part driven by a concern to maintain the neutrality of the scholar/teacher/researcher at a time when the presumed separation of the academic from the social and political was under fire both within and outside US higher education. Therefore the contribution of the compositionists I have been discussing to the institutional status of Composition in general and Basic Writing in particular must also be reviewed from the stance they take on issues of differences and power. Likewise, the difficulties of bringing the hegemony of empirical/expressive use of language on the discursive scene of Basic Writing’s birth is not only intellectual in the narrow sense but deeply social and historical. (84)

… I have tried to portray the teacher/researcher of basic writing in her function as a dominated within the dominant: riven by her commitment to the interests of students labeled as academic “aliens” and her professional inscription within the dominant. My purpose for retelling this story is to argue that historically, our commitment to posing fairer and more objective portraits of these students has been mediated by social, historical pressures to treat such alternative knowledge as neutral, universal Truth grounded solely in the “reality” inherent in the objects we study and teach–the students and their writing. The “scientific” rhetoric, in occluding our attention to the contradictory political motives and consequences of our research and teaching, has exempted us from the need to rigorously struggle against our alignments with the dominant when addressing issues of differences and power. While commitment to a fairer and more objective representation of the dominated is central to the work of basic writing, we need always to keep in mind, as we demand of our opponents, that “objectivity” and “fairness” are socially, historically constructed concepts and cannot be isolated from the question of who is speaking and to whom, for whom, why, when, and where. That is, if we are to rigorously address issues of differences and power in our research and teaching, we must refuse the tendency to essentialize knowledge, new and alternative or established and hegemonic. (101)

Horner: “Mapping Errors and Expectations for Basic Writing: From the ‘Frontier Field’ to ‘Border Country”

In this essay, Horner traces the rhetoric of the frontier image so frequently peppered throughout BW scholarship. The image not only euphemizes the image of the actual fontier, complete with devestating environmental and human colonization, but also describes basic writers as “new,” or “alien,” and thereby infantalizes or otherizes students whose backgrounds are more complex and have assests in learning academic writing. In contrast to these harmful images, Horner advocates a shift to a “border” image, which he argues:

while introducing new difficulties for teachers and students, effectively resolves the dilemmas posed by earlier conceptions of basic writing by identifying both students and teachers as active participants in negotiations of power and tus improving the expectations of both for the work they face in confronting one another. (118)

Metaphors of the border should be priviledged over those of the frontier, ultimately, because it acknowledges the historical and political circumstance in which academic discourse, teacher identities, and student identities are always in flux, and that the realities of literacy and learning must make visible the dynamics of power (that of both teachers AND students) within which the negotiation takes place. To not acknowledge the agency on both sides it to colonize the already-othered through a “politics of linguistic innocence” described in Lu’s “Refdefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy,” also found in this collection.

Horner: “Re-thinking the ‘Sociality’ of Error: Teaching Editing as Negotiation.”

Confronting the trend in BW scholarship to acknowledge language and conventions as social, but to treat errors as individual and cognitive, Horner seeks to help teachers understand how to teach error as social. Drawing on Sylvia Scribner and Raymond Williams, Horner makes the case that error recognized as such is a social achievement, and that “Any failure in conventions…represents a failure of the parties involved to reach agreement, the rejection of one party of the relationship expressed and/or offered y the other” (141). In other words, a particular construction cannot be recognized unless both parties agree to a particular convention. This highlights basic writing students’ writerly agency, wether they agree with teacher diagnoses of particular constructions as error or no. Horner suggests that establishing error is a process of negotiation, which “is not a matter of one party persuading a second to adopt the position of the first, nor a process of exchange (barter) between two parties, but a process of joint change and learning in which power operates dialectically” (142).

That negotiation occurs in every writing situation indicates, for Horner, the problem in much teaching of basic writing. Many teachers respond to the conflict between their goals of helping students master SWE and their understanding of the political circumstance of BW with a sort of resignation that indicates a view of language as fixed and static. Here he draws on Lu’s “Redefining” to indicated the political consequence of such am understanding of language. He warns, however, against the equally prevalent problem of  ascribing error primarily to cultural difference, as this assumes fixed and distinct cultural groups as well (155). Advocating the use of small group conferences and tailored assignments and class discussions, Horner argues that teaching students to negotiate error presents error as:

something about which they as writers must theorize and make choices, not something they need simply learn about and acquiesce to, though in their theorizing and in their writing they must also confront the theories, rankings, definitions of other readers (including teachers) as well. For such questions would put students in the position to negotiate and renegotiate the concept of “correctness,” including, importantly, the concept of its negotiability. (159)

Lu: “Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone”

Challenging both the conception of academic discourse as a discrete, unified code, and hence that of digressions as error, Lu advocates a border pedagogy that empowers students as writers with choice, whose rhetorical decisions represent a negotiation among discourses and reader expectations within a dynamic of unequal power arrangements. As she puts it:

…I am most interested in doing three things: (1) enabling students to hear discursive voices which conflict with and struggle against the voices of academic authority; (2) urging them to negotiate a position in response to these colliding voices; and (3) asking them to consider their choice of position in the context of the sociopolitical power relationships within and among diverse discourses and in the context of their personal life, history, culture, and society. (173)

Lu argues against those teachers who complain that the contact zone is too difficult, speaking of how reliance on “safe houses” can serve to simply reinforce those political consequences against which most BW teachers wish to fight (188). She essentially argues that teaching style as a process of negotiation may lead students to still choose the Standard, but at least they will not do so blindly (180), and that it is up to teachers and students to recognize that the sociality of language described by Honer [my connection, not hers] is precisely what opens the gaps within which we can use our agency to help shift language practices toward a more inclusive reality.