During his first term in office, President Obama announced plans for the American Graduation Initiative, which would serve to bridge the gap for millions of students who do not have access to a four year university education. This initiative was to include “$2.5 billion for construction and renovation at the nation's community colleges, $500 million to develop new online courses and $9 billion for ‘challenge grants’ aimed at spurring innovation at the colleges” (Shear). Last year, his office rolled out the Community College to Career Fund, which is an $8 billion investment in his 2013 budget that would work to train two million workers with job skills that would lead to jobs in industries that are expected to grow in the future, including “advanced manufacturing, clean energy and information technology” (White House Blog). This initiative is geared towards making sure that “community colleges have the resources they need to equip workers with crucial skills and industry-recognized credentials, and ensuring that employers in high-growth industries have the skilled workforce they need for positions that might otherwise go unfilled—or overseas” (Blog). In today’s economy, it is clear that many of the opportunities of educating the workforce of the United States will be centered in its 1,200 community colleges. Given the landscape of expected growth in the work that community colleges does, the spirit of open access and opportunity for all will also face increased challenges and obstacles to serve such a diverse population, including a growing percentage of nontraditional students.

           

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

             The core issue that I hope to explore through my capstone is addressing what these growing opportunities and resulting challenges means for the teaching of writing to students who have not been adequately prepared for college level studies. The unavoidable challenge present in the open access education, that is the mission of the community college, is in working to bridge the skills/preparedness gap without unnecessarily subjecting nontraditional and marginalized students to the outskirts of higher learning. The goal, as I see it, in the basic writing classes I hope to teach, is to show respect for the life experiences that my adult students have acquired outside the classroom and be able to teach them to use those skills to write their way to their college educations. Developmental writing instruction, which is very often one of the first college experiences for many underprepared students, serves as either an opportunity for growing a sense of belonging to the academic community, or as an inflexible barrier.
             As much as the hope is to be able to create a welcoming environment in which to address gaps in the writing skills that will provide the language necessary for success in academia, the challenges are real. The potential that exists in these gateway writing programs for “labeling students and for simplifying views of how adults learn language” cannot be denied (Soliday 85). At the same time, it would also not be of service to these underprepared learners to deny them the opportunity to obtain the skills and student experience they lack in a safe environment. While Mary Soliday explores the debate about mainstreaming students versus remedial programs, she also asserts that the key to addressing the core issue of assisting the basic writing student in the day to day business of learning is found in developing a program that “is responsive to the experiences and histories of nontraditional students” and “emphasizes linguistic self-consciousness, the study of language and culture, and social interactions with readers” (Soliday 95).
             Coupled with this awareness and respect of the “experiences and histories of nontraditional students,” it is also equally important to realize that this first taste of college level study should not undermine the potential of these students to genuinely join the community of academics. Bartholomae stresses that he “wanted to imagine a course where students worked with the materials valued in the college curriculum” and wanted to “think about ways of preparing underprepared students to work with the kinds of materials…the profession would say were ours, not theirs, materials that were inappropriate, too advanced” (Bartholomae 7). He asserts that this allows for an opportunity where “difficulty is confronted and negotiated, not erased” (8)—and we do not inadvertently, however good the intentions, produce the perception of the basic writer as “the ‘other’ who is the incomplete version of ourselves, confirming existing patterns of power and authority, reproducing the hierarchies we had meant to question and overthrow” (18). It is critical to acknowledge that nontraditional students are not incomplete people, defined by lack of ability or intellect, but instead are just lacking experience as students within a specific rhetorical space—academia.
             Further investigating this idea of the real power structure found at the core of basic writing instruction, Matthew Pavesich questions the “justice of equal treatment”—that the “equal treatment of every one means justice for all” (87). If we were to blindly “resort to liberalism for its neutral fairness,” within a system like the community college, “in practice, it operationalizes a pressure that is at once assimilatory, regulatory and disciplinary” (88). Within an institution that touts open access and opportunities for those who have traditionally been excluded from higher education, it is vitally important that these systems “must account for difference” (88) in a way that is not disciplinary. This is just as critical to acknowledge within the smaller scale of one basic writing classroom. Pavesich presents as an answer to the system that may mistaken “equal procedures, like the universal requirement and placement testing, for fair procedures” that “forces thousands of increasingly diverse students to assimilate to normative language standards or be relegated to a kind of purgatory in higher education” (90) the rhetorically-oriented writing classroom that teaches students to “write in a way that is conscious and reaches out to the other, with critical awareness of situation, audience, purpose and genre” (99). As also emphasized by Soliday and Bartholomae, this allows for instructors to “value difference among students…while also mobilizing acknowledgement by setting students into certain types of rhetorical motion” (Pavesich 100). It must be possible to respect and value the diversity that is present in the basic writing classroom, while giving students ways to use their experiences and differences as an added value to their learning and practice of writing.
             From my limited teaching experience and through my research, I recognize the significance of becoming a teacher that students can trust, allowing them to “take risks, connect the self to the material, and experiment” while insisting on high standards and challenges that will ensure real growth (Elbow 329).  As Elbow asserts, I hope to be always be able to see “through their mistakes or ignorance to the intelligence that lies behind” (332), while at the same time continuing to challenge them to write in ways that they are unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Also in the spirit of Blau’s assertions in The Literature Workshop, I hope to show my students that writing is not easy or painless for anyone, regardless of experience or skill level. I would like to reveal the ways that I am “still learning, still willing to look at things in new ways, still sometimes uncertain or even stuck, still willing to ask naïve questions, still engaged in the interminable process of working out the relationship between what we teach and the rest of our lives” (Elbow 332). As Blau put it, make it so that students do not think of writing as “something that competent students or adults do in a single pass, in one effortless draft, without struggle and frustration” (31).

             The first obstacle to overcome will be the belief that “struggle and frustration are the signs of incompetence, lack of knowledge, or insufficiency in skill” (Blau 31). Through many or varied low stakes writing opportunities, I hope to show students that writing is a “process of making meaning or text construction that is frequently accompanied by false stats and faulty visions, requiring frequent and messy reconstruction and revision.” I think that providing opportunities for taking risks, without fear of experiencing struggle and perceived failure, is the place of growth as developing writers.

​

​

​

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. “The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum.” Journal of ​

             Basic Writing 12.1 (1993): 4-21. Print. 



Blau, Sheridan D. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers. Portsmouth,
             NH: Heinemann, 2003. Print.

​

Elbow, Peter. “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process.” College English 45:4 (1983):
             327-339. Print.

​

Pavesich, Matthew. “Reflecting on the Liberal Reflex: Rhetoric and the Politics of
             Acknowledgement in Basic Writing.” Journal of Basic Writing 30:2 (2011): 84-109. Print.

​

Shear, Michael D. and Daniel de Vise. “Obama Announces Community College Plan.”  The
             Washington Post 15 July 2009. Print.

​

Slack, Megan. “President Obama's Plan to Train 2 Million Workers for Jobs in High-Demand
             Industries.” The White House Blog. 13 Feb 2012. Web.

​

Soliday, Mary. “From the Margins to the Mainstream: Reconceiving Remediation.” College
             Composition and Communication 47.1 (1996): 85-100. Print.