Rachael Shapiro

learner. teacher. maker.

Search Results Tag: political economy

Lu, Min-Zhan. “Living-English Work.”

by Rachael

Published on: August 30, 2012

Categories: diss, Reading Notes

Tags:2006, english only, globalization, living-english, min-zhan lu, political economy, politics of discourse, translingualism, transnationalism

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Lu, Min-Zhan. “Living-English Work.” College English 68.6 (2006): 605-618. Print.

Summary
In this article, Lu develops the concept of “living English” in opposition to English-only: the former recognizes the fluidity of language, meaning, and expression among and between users of English from varied positionalities and material realities, while the latter assumes a (false) unified standard code of correctness. She opens the article with an account of recent new stories of tongue surgeries in developing nations, where people’s goals are to speak “accent-free English” in order to be more competitive in the global marketplace.

Lu uses a combination of Marxist language and a sense of global context as a way to complicate her discussion of English-only versus living-English. She asks us to look beyond our linguistic and cultural borders as a way to understand the baring of our values on “the planetary scope of the hegemony of English” (612). She asks us to attend to our practices in our classrooms and our scholarship in order to consciously engage with the ideological production of language and its material consequences on a global scale. My own project makes this move of combining political economic concepts and theories of globalization in order to interrogate the impact of Western rhetorics of digital literacies, rather than English-only. Like Lu, I believe we ought to examine texts that reflect the maintenance of and manifestation of rhetorics in which we have a stake as writing teachers and as representatives of the advantaged, or One-Thirds world.

Quotes

English-only efforts involve geopolitical, economic, and cultural transactions.
They aim to control not merely which language can be used, where, and
when, but also and always how that language is to be used by its actual, possible, or imagined users. And they discipline users to be preoccupied with two and only two questions: What counts as correct usage in the eyes of those in positions to withhold educational and job opportunities? How might I best learn to work English strictly according to these rulings? (605)

I am increasingly convinced of my need to see the “popularity” of tongue surgery in “developing” countries as intricately informed by what we in “developed” countries do and do not do when addressing our own and our students’ ambivalence toward English-only rulings. (606)

Furthermore, the only motivation for learning English is to improve one’s career prospects in the capitalist global market. The reports can also serve as reminders that we live in a world increasingly ordered by the interests of “developed” countries such as the United States in globalizing their hypercompetitive, technology-driven market economies, what critics have termed “flexible, information economies” or “fast capitalism” (Castells; Harvey). (607)

Given the currency of such commissions in the current-day United States, all of us in English studies need to wrestle with our charge to produce only bodies (with a particular length of frenulum) and affects (such as tongue-tied or tongue-loose feelings) that are useful for a “biopolitical structuring of the world” according to the “business” logic of “developed” countries (Hardt and Negri 32). We need to raise and pursue two related questions: What gross actions and inactions on our part might have directly and indirectly pressured users of English to see symbolic and surgical fixes as the only viable resolution to their own and their children’s tongue-tied feelings? How might we best go about problematizing English-only rulings on the uses and users of English? (607)

English-only instruction parades the (seldom delivered) promise of ensuring access to wider communication and better educational and job opportunities.
But living-English users weigh dominant stories of what English-only instructions can do for them carefully against what such training has historically done to them and to peoples, cultures, societies, and continents whose language practices do not match standardized English usages. (608)

Living English users also weigh the promise of better educational and job opportunities against what English-only instruction cannot do: it cannot address their needs to use English to articulate-work out meaningful connections across experiences and circumstances of life consistently discredited by standardized English usages. (609)

That is, we need to fight for students’ right to fashion an English that bears the burden of experiences delegitimized by English-only usages. Moreover, we need to “challenge” ourselves to unlearn a “learned” disposition: our fear that attention to the needs and rights to transform standardized usages will interfere with rather than enhance the ability of individuals to learn English. (610)

Living-English users focus energy on how to tinker with the very standardized usages they are pressured by dominant notions of educational and job opportunities to “imitate.” (610)

We need to probe the ways our sense of ease with a particular usage might inadvertently sponsor systems and relations of injustice, even and especially when that usage seems to make normal and standard a particular experience that appears common, natural, beneficial to us. (611)

The four lines of living-English inquiry are in keeping with work in U.S. composition that marks as assets-critical resources-two aspects of individual users’ lives: (1) their actual, often complex, and sometimes conflicting relations with diverse languages and diverse ways of using English; and (2) their interests in using English to articulate aspirations for life that are consistently delegitimized by the logic of global business but critical to the well-being of peoples bearing the cost of existing structures and relations of injustice. (611)

How can I stay vigilant toward my professional training and thus often inadvertent sponsorship of the various English-only fallacies? (611)

the planetary scope of the hegemony of English (612)

How might I put my work in the context of escalating U.S. political and economic interests in harnessing information technology to maintain its global hegemony (Harvey)? (612)

How might U.S. composition articulate a global perspective that attends to rather than blurs the actual, specific, physical-social-historical contexts of individual students’ life and work? (612)

A global perspective on the work of U.S. composition in a world driven by the logic of fast capitalism must address the politics of language practices in scientific, technical, commercial, legal, and administrative writing. (616)

If we continue to sponsor English-only assumptions in our day-to-day practice, chances are that English will be used as a supposedly “neutral” tool for perpetuating the logic of a “free market economy”… (617)

Faigley, Lester. “Beyond Imagination: The Internet and Global Digital Literacy.”

by Rachael

Published on: July 29, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, diss, Reading Notes

Tags:1999, computers and composition, internet history, lester faigley, political economy, rhetoric of digital literacy

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Faigley, Lester. “Beyond Imagination: The Internet and Global Digital Literacy.” Passions, Pedagogies, and 21^st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999. Print.

Summary

In his contributed chapter, Faigley opens with 4 news articles from overseas in the Spring of 1996 in which the picture of a sense of awe at the power of the Internet for education and business is spreading. Attending to the new hope and dampening its celebration with material concerns, Faigley poses the following questions:

In President Clinton’s words, “This phenomenon has absolutely staggering possibilities to democratize, to empower people all over the world. It could make it possible for every child with access to a computer to stretch a hand across a keyboard, to reach every book ever written, every painting ever painted, ever symphony ever composed.” It raises the question: How does education change for a child who begins school with the potential to communicate with millions of other children and adults, to publish globally, and to explore the largest library ever assembled? (131)
Thus my second question is: how will education be affected by the increasing presence of large corporations in making decisions about how children and adults will learn? (132)
The question present in these stories is: what sort of future will children enter in the aftermath of the massive redistribution of wealth and disruption of patterns of employment that have occurred during the last two decades? (132)

Faigley notes that “times of major transition offer many possibilities as well as pitfalls, and those who can assess the terrain will be in the best positions to make convincing arguments about what roads to take” (132). The possibilities he describes for the Internet’s impact on education include “communicating one-to-one, communicating in groups, publishing globally, and finding information globally” (132.)

Following a discussion of the 4 named benefits to education afforded by the internet, Faigley goes on to describe some challenges; he includes: the overwhelming amount of information, the trouble with misinformation and hence the need for critical information literacy, and access as tainted by corporate control in the age of privatized Internet beginning . He explains that while some theorists dream of a “techno-utopia” wherein all that’s needed is access for endless communication, “this vision continues a deeply embedded libertarian ideology that dates to the origins of the Internet as a Cold War project designed to maintain communications in the aftermath of a nuclear war” (135). Faigley also notes the concerns related to a few corporate communications giants having total control of what “access” to the Internet might mean.

Faigley also forecasts the spread of for-profit online, career and certification based higher education, the characteristics of which still hold true today (see bulleted list on 136).

He worries that with integrating the Internet into education, we will have to rethink what we want students to learn and how we can best support them in that learning through curricular design (137-8). He concludes the article with 6 propositions for how to respond effectively to those questions. He suggests that students and teachers will benefit most from technology when we highlight: collaborative learning, student-centered instruction, more geographically diverse student bodies, small classes with more technical support, teacher training and support for use of technology, and a sense of patience (138).

Quotes

In February 1996, the signing into law of the Telecommunications Reform Act set off a frenzy of mergers and partnerships among corporations involved in computing, communications, publishing, and entertainment–mergers that perhaps are only the beginnings of consolidation of power as the giants buy up the technology to control how we work, how we get information, how we shop, how we relax, and how we communicate with other people. (135)

Anderson, Virginia. “Supply-Side Dreams: Composition, Technology, and the Circular Logic of Class.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 20, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2010, charles moran, class, critical digital divide, cynthia selfe, digital divide, political economy, stuart selber, virginia anderson

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Anderson, Virginia. “Supply-Side Dreams: Composition, Technology, and the Circular Logic of Class.”Computers and Composition 27.2 (2010): 124-137. Print.

Summary

Drawing on literacy and digital literacy scholarship that sees both as situated and constructed, Anderson critiques claims that composition educators and scholars are obligated to learn and teach critical digital literacies due to the class-based access divide found among teachers (not just students).

Retelling the story of a shoddy course management system update, in which the developers–to save money–put out an under-tested product whose costs in faculty time and energy helped highlight the relationship between usability, digital literacies, economics, and class/power differences within a university faculty.

Concerned with the ways in which OSS and usability demand resources that are unequally distributed among faculty, Anderson argues that we must step back from the rhetoric of “trailblazing” and “pioneering,” having those in computers and writing think of themselves instead as representatives who can think critically about and advocate for material affects of technology development.

Quotes

Unlike many discussions of access, this article does not focus on the need to make technology more available across socioeconomic boundaries. Rather, I address a central assumption of the “dominant discourse” on computers in composition (Ellen Barton, as cited in Moran, 1999, p. 208): that keeping up with and exploiting technological innovation will benefit literacy educators. I argue that a too-exuberant embrace of this assumption can blind scholars to the effects of small but meaningful decisions on the everyday practice of teachers. [...] Living through the imposition of more and better technology at Indiana University has made visible to me in concrete terms the impacts such blindness can have. The experience gives presence to the material barriers to agency that many literacy educators face and the costs of surmounting those barriers. Most importantly, it suggests that, contrary to a thread of the dominant discourse that contends that technological change is an unstoppable train, composition as a field need not be a breathless passenger as these material challenges accumulate. This case study suggests that composition scholars on the bright side of the divide not only should, but can, address this inequality. Our celebration of their leadership casts such scholars as pioneers who break ground that those of us who follow can settle and civilize. I contend that they can better serve composition, and the community of faculty and students it comprises, by resisting this self-identification as “pioneers” and “visionaries” to choose instead the role of “representatives” for others who are differently situated in the field. (125)

What has emerged from this challenge to my status is a sense of actually living the theoretical postulates about class that have occupied composition scholarship. Locating the embodied experience of being “down-classed” in this larger discussion allows me to explore how changes that may seem trivial from the theoretical outside can have measurable effects. Before this experience, I had not fully considered the implications of composition’s insistence that literacy educators must, as a duty, enter the competitive, unstable environment in which technological innovation typically thrives. This article attempts to highlight those implications for my technologically adept colleagues in composition studies, some of whom may have inadvertently exacerbated these problems through small but surprisingly meaningful decisions, and many of whom, if aware of the power inherent in their roles, might more effectively champion those whose practice they impact. (126)

My experience as a classed user of IU’s Oncourse CL supports this warning that composition’s revision of its mission to make compositionists players in the fast-moving world of futuristic innovation can too easily, if not undertaken with the utmost self-consciousness, serve as yet another instantiation of the class divide Harris described, an instantiation that the pioneers in the process of creating it may not fully recognize. (126-7)

Thus, for a faculty member to go elsewhere like a disgruntled customer requires not only more time investment (and therefore de facto submission to the power relation), but also deliberate resistance—and being driven to resort to resistance to assert one’s needs is again to acknowledge the power differential and thereby accept the naming of one’s class.

Clearly, usability testing, the process of learning how web tools will work in the actual situations in which users will employ them, is an important way designers develop their relationships with users and clarify what power differentials exist. (130-1)

It is possible that decisions meant to liberate students in fact privilege a certain kind of student; they certainly privilege a certain kind of faculty member and a certain kind of teaching. [...] The ethos of composition, and of humanities studies in general, does call for a critical examination like the one composition scholars promote, in which students and faculty alike examine the social, economic, and cultural implications of the technology they use—but not the examination that is usually intended, one that uncritically relies on every department’s getting someone “out there,” ready to recognize what’s coming down the pike and sound the alarm if things go wrong. There seems to be little recognition of the material realities that mean that not every department in every institution of higher learning can meet this demand. (135)

Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 19, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, diss, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1985, bernard de mandeville, jonathan kozol, monopoly capital, political economy, politics of literacy, richard ohmann, walter ong

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Ohmann, Richard. “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital.” College English (1985): 675–689. Print.

Summary

In this prescient essay, Ohmann takes on the task of reminding us that though computer literacies might be new and exciting, they need to be thought with regard to the same political and economic contexts that have historically complicated literacy in general. He reminds us that literacies and their technologies are often developed, touted, and distributed from above, systemically and cyclically affecting citizens along the same axes of race, class, gender, etc. that allow maintenance of the status quo. He concludes that computer literacy, like any literacy, is not inherently liberatory and will only serve democratic purposes if we actively intervene to help it do so.

Quotes

I claim that exhortations about the need for “computer literacy” have much in common with longer-standing debates about literacy itself; that both kinds of discussion usually rest on a serious misconception of technology and its roles in history; and that we can best understand the issues that trouble us by situating them within the evolution of our present economic and social system-a very recent historical process, going back little more than a hundred years. The whole discussion presumes that questions of literacy and technology are inextricable from political questions of domination and equality. (675)

Once the lower orders came to be seen as masses and classes, the term “literacy” offered a handy way to conceptualize an attribute of theirs, which might be manipulated in one direction or the other for the stability of the social order and the prosperity and security of the people who counted. (677)

All of this-the analytic division of people into measurable quantities, the attempt to modify these quantities, the debate among professionals and political leaders over what’s good for the poor-all this legacy still inheres in the discourse of literacy, even now, when almost everyone takes it for granted that literacy is a Good Thing, and when it would be hard to find a Mandeville to argue that the poor should be kept illiterate in order to keep them content. (677)

The technology developed over a century and more, in ways far from accidental. Those with the vision, the needs, the money, and the power gradually made it what they wanted-a mass medium. (I exaggerate only a bit.) Technology, one might say, is it-self a social process, saturated with the power relations around it, continually re-shaped according to some people’s intentions. (681)

Perhaps I can make the point another way by entering a friendly objection to some characteristic formulations of Walter Ong, one of our most stimulating and learned writers on these matters. In Interfaces of the Word, for instance, he writes of “technological devices . . . which enable men to … shape, store, retrieve, and communicate knowledge in new ways” (44). Again, “writing and print and the computer enable the mind to constitute within itself… new ways of thinking. . . .” (46). And, “the alphabet or print or the computer enters the mind, producing new states of awareness there. … the computer actually releases more energy for new kinds of exploratory operations by the human mind itself .. .” (47). My objections are, first, to phrases like “the computer,” as if it were one, stable device; second, to these phrases used as grammatical agents (“the computer enables the mind .. .”), implying that the technology somehow came before someone’s intention to enable some minds to do some things; and third, to phrases like “man,” “the mind,” and “the human mind,” in these contexts, suggesting that technologies interact with people or with “culture” in global, undifferentiated ways, rather than serving as an arena of interaction among classes, races, and other groups of unequal power. (681)

I am suggesting that, seen from the side of production and work, the computer and its software are an intended and developing technology, carrying forward the deskilling and control of labor that goes back to F. W. Taylor and beyond, and that has been a main project of monopoly capital. (683)

Graduates of MIT will get the challenging jobs; community college grads will be technicians; those who do no more than acquire basic skills and computer literacy in high school will probably find their way to electronic workstations at McDonald’s. I see every reason to expect that the computer revolution, like other revolutions from the top down, will indeed expand the minds and the freedom of an elite, meanwhile facilitating the degradation of labor and the stratification of the workforce that have been hallmarks of monopoly capitalism from its onset. (683)

Seen from this side of the market, computers are a commodity, for which a mass market is being created in quite conventional ways. And their other main use in the home, besides recreation, most likely will be to facilitate the market-ing of still more commodities, as computerized shopping becomes a reality. Thus our “age of technology” looks to me very much like the age of monopoly capital, with new channels of power through which the few try to control both the labor and the leisure of the many. (684)

Now, none of these developments is foreordained. The technology is malle-able; it does have liberatory potential. Especially in education, we have some-thing to say about whether that potential is realized. But its fate is not a technological question: it is a political one. (685)

Literacy is an activity of social groups, and a necessary feature of some kinds of social organization. Like every other human activity or product, it embeds social relations within it. And these relations always include conflict as well as cooperation. Like language itself, literacy is an exchange be-tween classes, races, the sexes, and so on. Simply recall the struggle over black English, or think on the continuing conflict over the CCCC statement, “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” or the battle over generic male pronouns, for times when the political issues have spilled out into the open. But explicit or not, they are always there, in every classroom and in every conversation-just as broadcasting technology is an exchange which has up to now been resolved through control by the dominant classes, and participation by the subordinate classes in the form of Neilson ratings and call-in shows. That means that we can usefully distinguish between literacy-from-above and literacy-from-below. (685-6)

Technique is less important than context and purpose in the teaching of literacy; and the effects of literacy cannot be isolated from the social relations and processes within which people become literate. Enough. The age of computer technology will bring us some new tools and methods for teaching literacy. I hope we (or rather, those of us teachers who are on my side!) will manage to shape that technology to democratic forms. (686)

But this age of technology, this age of computers, will change very little in the social relations-the class relations-of which literacy is an inextricable part. Monopoly capital will continue to saturate most classrooms, textbooks, student essays, and texts of all sorts. It will continue to require a high degree of literacy among elites, especially the professional-managerial class. It will continue to re-quire a meager literacy or none from subordinate classes. And yet its spokesmen-the Simons and Newmans and Safires and blue ribbon commissions on education-will continue to kvetch at teachers and students, and to demand that all kids act out the morality play of literacy instruction, from which the mor-al drawn by most will be that in this meritocracy they do not merit much. But then monopoly capital will also continue to generate resistance and rebellion, more at some times than at others. I hope many of us will find ways to take part in that resistance, even in our daily work. Apparently we must learn to fight mindless computer literacy programs, as we have sometimes fought mind-less drills in grammar and usage. We should remember that most programmed instruction, in addition to being mindless, builds in imperatives other than ours and other than those of our students. (687-8)

We should be critically analyzing the politics of all these tendencies, trying to comprehend them historically, and engaging our students in a discussion of literacy and tech-nology that is both historical and political. It’s worth trying to reconstitute liter-acy as a process of liberation-but also to remember that work for literacy is not in itself intrinsically liberating. The only way to have a democracy is to make one. (688)

Winant, Howard. The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice.

by Rachael

Published on: November 8, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2004, antiracism, dialectic, du bois, globalism, globalization, gramsci, howard winant, political economy, racism

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Winant, Howard. The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Print.

Summary

In this collection of essays, Winant reflects on the history of race and racism in the US, and cites antiracism as the first transnational social movement. He defines racism as “the routinized outcome of practices that create or reproduce hierarchical social structures based on essentialized racial categories” (126). Winant understands the concept of race as both hegemonic and global (5), and microsocial and identity-shaping. Among his most important insights in analyzing the racial world system is noting the “racial break” that began in WWII and continued throughout the latter half of the 21st century (15). In this reshaping, racial domination shifts to racial hegemony, as oppressors needed to account for domestic racial politics in the context of the war’s (claimed) democratic motives. The need to appease the advocates of antiracist and anticolonial movements led to reform, rather than revolution, in the US and elsewhere, in which political incorporation (99) pacified activists without providing real structural change. Pacification allowed for neoliberal and neoconservative voices to question and challenge policies like affirmative action as “reverse discrimination” under the guise of postracial or colorblind rhetoric (43).

Winant sees the break as happening on a global level, though specific political renegotiations happened (are happening) locally within national contexts. He sees globalization as “racialized social structure,” noting the ways in which the IMF, WTO, and more help to preserve the cultural hegemony of whites along the North-South and East-West global axes (135) through “debt peonage” and more (89-91), with racism only more blatant in Western nations post-9/11 (122-5). Like Gramsci and Hardt and Negri, however, Winant recognizes the constant dialectic within which racism and globalization can be thought in terms of resistance generated therein: antiracism and globalism. In one essay, Winant explains this dynamic as it connects to the US and global racial systems, writing that:

…today the parallel between postwar anti-imperial movements and antiracist ones continues, as the new imperialism confronts an ongoing demand for greater democracy in the U.S. “homeland.” (144)

He recognizes that the increasing mobilization of peoples characteristic of globalization has increases the global diaspora, rendering questions of nationalism and citizenship once more a dramatic racial conflict in local national contexts (145-7).

Overall, Winant’s continual citation of Du Bois’s declaration of the 20th century’s problem as that of the color-line reinvokes the question for our own century. What could better be described in the global era as the color matrix must take into account global, national, and regional practices of race and racism, looking to political economy, residual traces of racial historic blocs, and keeping in mind ways in which hegemony cannot be thought without also thinking resistance.

Quotes

So the veil has proved itself capable of adapting very well to antiracist reforms. This is true both at the microsocial level of the self, the individual who must interpret and “theorize” her own experience, and at the macrosocial level of our economic, political, and cultural institutions, where resources are distributed and our “collective representations” (a Durkheimian phrase) are produced, challenged, and changed. (37)

This dilemma remains unresolved: how can democratic nonracial institutions be constructed in a society where most attributes of socioeconomic position and identity remain highly racialized? (102)

In fact there is a powerful dialectic of democracy and race, in which race plays a contradictory role: On the one hand, democratic political logics are elaborated over the heads of racially defined “others” who are deemed unworthy of political participation. But on the other hand, the movements that challenge racial oppression–and that challenged slavery in an earlier time–have greatly advanced the entry of the popular strata, the masses, into politics. (111)

…movements challenging injustice (of all types, not just racial ones) seek to have their claims adopted by the state, embodied in policies of reform, and enforces throughout society.

This is what “winning” means under conditions of hegemony: that the state is pressured to adopt as many movement demands as possible. Of course, hegemonic states, seeking to subdue opposition, attempt to adopt as few reform measures as necessary, just enough to defuse their challengers’ momentum and to reinforce their credibility with their supporters. This elaborate relationship, this complex political dance among states, elites, movements, and masses is have “hegemony” means. Racial hegemony/racial formation works by synthesizing the distinct elements of this conflict–as the macrolevel of institutions and social structures, and at the microlevel of experiences and identities. But hegemony is a process; no synthesis can be more than temporary. Gramsci describes hegemony as “the formation and overcoming of unstable equilibria” (1971, 182).

To understand movement politics under conditions of racial hegemony is to recognize that reforms won will usually be more “moderate” than what was demanded, that insurgent movements are generally split by their very achievements into accommodationist and radical fractions, and that gains thus achieved are purchased at the price of at least partial demobilization. The successful movement has undermines some of the conditions for its own existence. It falls back to a quiescent or marginalized phase of the political trajectory. Winning is losing. (215-6)

Shor, Ira. “Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality.”

by Rachael

Published on: November 3, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1997, gramsci, ira shor, neoliberalism, ohmann, political economy, political pedagogy, sharon crowley

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Shor, Ira. “Our Apartheid: Writing Instruction and Inequality.” Journal of Basic Writing 16.1 (1997): 91-104. Print.

Summary

In this piece, Shor lives up to his precedent of attending to issues of power, politics, and economics in composition in order to understand our field and its economic complicity in maintaining existing power relations. Citing Gramsci, Ohmann, and Crowley, he recalls the Harvard history of comp classes as a gatekeeping device. Labeling basic writing as the “younger sibling” in this story, Shor explains that “to help secure the status quo against democratic change in school and society, a BW language policy producing an extra layer of control was apparently needed to discipline students in an undisciplined age” (92). Looking at our complicity in an unequal education system, Shor questions whether “BW courses shelter more than they shunt” (96).

To view his critiques in their historical context, it is important to think about how many of the critiques of Basic Writing curricula he makes are upon pedagogies that in many schools are no longer in practice, such as timed tests, skill-and-drill worksheets, and placement exams (probably thanks, in part, to this article). Nevertheless, his assessments are still potent and relevant. He writes that “Tracking and testing are the Twin Towers [ouch!] of Unequal City wherein BW resides” (97). Asking if BW can stand up to real democratic scrutiny (97), and scowling at the was in which it is co-opted by administrations through placement tests and the pressures for constant quantitative accountability (98).

In the end, Shor has some hope that we can stop using BW as a money-machine in service of unjust economic and social projects. But, importantly, his suggestions for how to do this involve a move toward systemic and institutional restructuring, rather than just pedagogical changes (99-101). He advocates a C’s labor policy to wrestle the work of comp, and especially BW, from the throes of inequitable work conditions, as well as a move toward more holistic writing assessment (like portfolios), and overall, that we see the struggles of a neoliberal political context to be a persuasive exigence for change.

Quotes

“Politically, then, BW is a containment track below freshman comp, a gate below the gate.” (94)

“…mass education can threaten the stability or legitimacy of the status quo is it graduates too many deserving students into an American economy unwilling to pay them what they are worth as it sends jobs abroad. As I see it, these immoral conditions cry out for critical teaching in our writing courses. Critical classrooms would invite students to focus on their everyday life in the system causing our problems…. Overall, I view BW as one mechanism that functions to ease the growing conflict between corporate economic policy and a mass of aspiring students who are being deterred from democracy and the American Dream.” (95-6)

“Farewell to educational apartheid; farewell to tests, programs and classes supporting inequality; farewell to the triumphant Harvard legacy now everywhere in place, constantly troubled, widely vulnerable, waiting for change.” (101)

Gilyard, Keith. “Basic Writing, Cost Effectiveness, and Ideology.”

by Rachael

Published on: February 8, 2011

Categories: basic writing, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2000, Basic Writing, critical literacy, critical pedagogy, henry giroux, keith gilyard, political economy

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Citation: Gilyard, Keith. “Basic Writing, Cost Effectiveness, and Ideology.” Journal of Basic Writing 19.1 (2000): 36-42. Print.

Summary: Gilyard looks at the reemergence of the debate on abolition of the required writing course, tied to similar arguments about the cost-effectiveness of basic writing programs. While he once advocated the abolitionist view, he was reminded that there are few radical spaces left where the teaching of critical literacy and language is even possible. He admits that required writing courses can and do often maintain linguistic hegemony, but he also encourages us to remember that not all programs are the same. There are many in which real, genuinely radical work is being done, spaces in which the langauge of power is being appropriated by those who most need it. Finally, he reminds us to think of “the long-term social costs of policy positions we assume, not on the immediate bottom lines with which too many administrators are obsessed” (37). In other words, cost-effectiveness needs to be reconceived in terms of the benefit or harm to students’ critical consciousness, not the school’s budget.

Quotes:

If ‘critical literacy is both a narrative for agency as well a a referent for critique,’ as Henry Giroux argues (10), and if the purpose of a general education is to help position students to question systematically and perhaps even contest the forces that dominate their lives rather than to train them to become simply the victims or even ‘innocent’ beneficiaries of those forces, then any space one gets to promote agency and critical faculty is valuable territory not to be conceded. (37)

What I am arguing as well is that the stress on empirical evidence to justify such courses, a matter White and Crowley seem to agree upon, is mostly beside the point. If we do not ask if there is need for required composition but, rather, if there is need to teach critical language awareness, of which producing text is a central part, whenever we can command sites to do so, I cannot fathom how the radically inclined can answer in the negative. Empirical studies are necessary to document good work, but they are not needed to make the initial case. (38)

Sure, required writing courses reproduce dominant ideologies, serve regulatory ends, and stifle creativity, but that is not all they do. The possibility for challenge and change, which could mean sustained access and opportunity for many students, is undeniably present. Some of us know this through personal experience both as students and teachers. We challenged and lost, then won, then lost, perserved to win some more..and so it goes. (41)

Discussion: Gilyard challenges the commitments of writing programs to the cause of critical literacy: is it about money, or about students? He directly names basic writing as a progressive and social justice-motivated task, and calls out, in response to Crowly, for us to put our money where our mouths are. The natural extension of this piece might be a political economic analysis of the history of basic writing at several institutions. The question seems directly related to the conversation that began it all as well, open admissions. I wonder what the cost-analysis might reveal about international/esl students and if or how the scenario is different with higher tuition and non-credit granting basic writing or esl courses.

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