against cognitivist characterizations of writers and writing began to intensify. By 1987, Janice N. Hays, coeditor of the 1983 anthology The Writer’s Mind: Writing as a Mode of Thinking, felt so beset by attacks on cognitivist approaches that she published “Models of Intellectual Development and Writing: A Response to Myra Kogen et al.,” a primer-like article addressing “prevalent misunderstandings about developmental models” (11). Among these “misunderstandings,” Kogen’s article with the seemingly innocent title “The Conventions of Expository Writing” was the explicit and immediate provocation. But Ann Berthoff’s “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning” and Patricia Bizzell’s “William Perry and Liberal Education” were also featured instances of opposition to developmental theories of writing.
This defense of cognitivism now seems a rearguard action, effectively trumped by Mike Rose’s critique of such “developmental models,” though they were models he himself had invoked and applied at the start of the decade. In “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism” (1988), he enumerated three major problems with cognitive and developmental theories: (1) they “end up leveling rather than elaborating individual differences”; (2) they “encourage a drift away from careful, rigorous focus on student writing”; and (3) they “inadvertently reflect cultural stereotypes” (296–97).
Not one to skewer one approach without pointing to an alternative, Rose used the same article to direct attention to the “immediate social and linguistic conditions in which the student composes” (297). He had in fact elaborated what this meant in another important article published mid-decade: “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University.” There he invoked Shaughnessy and her resistance to simplifications and stereotypes: “If we fully appreciate her message, we see how inadequate and limiting the remedial model is. Instead, we need to define our work as transitional or as initiatory, orienting, or socializing to what David Bartholomae and Patricia Bizzell call the academic discourse community” (358).
As Rose was issuing the call for socialization into the academic discourse community, the work that had the most significant impact on BW pedagogy since Errors and Expectations came out: David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky’s Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts (1986). The book, essentially the documentation of a successful “Basic Reading and Writing Course for the College Curriculum” (Bartholomae’s descriptive subtitle published in the Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers), was influential for a number of reasons beyond the conjunction of reading with writing. The appeal of the program was in fact multifaceted: well-grounded in a specific institutional context (the University of Pittsburgh), it offered a fully realized curriculum, created collaboratively (with the collaborators describing its different aspects). Conceptually, it resolutely resisted “dumbing down” instruction for the sake of weaker students, advocating instead constructive “misreadings” and doing so by recourse to contemporary critical theory. Anecdotal yet scholarly, theoretical yet practical, general in its implications yet carefully situated and contextualized, it seemed to be just what the field needed.
The masterstroke was not to define the basic writer so much as to define what the basic writer must work on and work with. Cognitivists and others had tried to define the basic writer with recourse to schemes and abstractions. The charge laid against them, inevitably, was oversimplification, reductionism, reification, and caricature. They had neglected context. And context, in the Pittsburgh model, was key: BW students had to be situated in and socialized to the academic context, acclimated to “the academic discourse community.” It would be the 1990s before the field would come to acknowledge just how problematic this goal was, a project of acculturation that would seem, from some perspectives, egregiously assimilationist. Caught in such a politically incorrect posture, the field would also be prepared, from some perspectives, to declare itself outmoded. What complicated that inclination to dismantle BW from the inside was the dismantling of it by outside forces, once again threatening to eradicate support structures and to limit access for weaker students—and doing so with motives Shaughnessy would have recognized as all too familiar.
The 1990s
A book published in 1989 (on the eve of the nineties, as it were) and republished as a popular paperback in 1990 helped set the tone for a significant shift of attention. This book got personal about teaching and learning, about students and teachers. And its publication and reception were of such import as to make its appearance something almost everyone would notice. The book was Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared. When it was published in paperback, the subtitle became A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educational Underclass; poignancy was, in fact, at the heart of its appeal. Already a force to be reckoned with, Rose made Lives about his own life to a considerable extent. A mix-up in test scores had placed him on the vocational track for a while in high school, and his account of this episode added special force to his ongoing argument against the easy labeling of remedial students—especially unexamined constructions of them as insufficiently developed or intelligent or literate and above all when so construed by high-stakes, single-shot assessments. His accounts of the students he knew as a caseworker were similarly multidimensional, offering a rich sense of their ethnic backgrounds, their economic and educational difficulties, their often untapped strengths.
Lives was the academic equivalent of a blockbuster. A few years after its publication, Mark Wiley was writing that it met with
deservedly unequivocal praise. In fact, the book’s overwhelmingly positive reception suggests that Rose managed to do what no one else has so far been able to accomplish: to get everybody to agree on something. In this case, it is the power and eloquence of Lives to validate and reaffirm the potential of America’s underclass, those who have much to offer but who inevitably slip through the (I think rather large) cracks of the educational system and who in the process become the system’s casualties. These are the students who are consigned to the lower tracks, who are labeled “remedial” and sometimes harshly judged as “uneducable.”
If it’s possible to imagine a canon for composition, Rose’s book, I suspect, would be a unanimous choice. (529)
Actually, Wiley said as much in responding to someone who might dissent from that unanimity. His “Building a Rose Garden: A Response to John Trimbur” (1993) points to an exception in the “unequivocal praise” Lives met with. Trimbur, in “Articulation Theory and the Problem of Determination: A Reading of Lives on the Boundary” (1993), had not disputed the enormous popularity of Rose’s book but had worried about its cause: for Trimbur, it was too much the conventional success story, a kind of academic variant on Horatio Alger. But he concluded in the book’s favor, reckoning that Rose had used the conventional frame to appeal to a wider audience with an important message.
Rose’s Lives did, in any case, usher in the great decade of literacy narratives—autobiographical accounts of educational development and watershed moments in the acquisition of language and literacy. What’s more, it helped to focus attention on both sides of the watershed for underprepared students: not just the confrontation with academic culture but also the home culture that sustained identity formation. In this it was complemented by “Arts of the Contact Zone” (1991), in which Mary Louise Pratt argued that different discourses grounded in different cultures should find a place for meeting and even mediation in the classroom. This was an invitation for teachers and students to negotiate racial and ethnic as well as cultural differences. Soon other work encouraging this type of negotiation began to appear. Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence was published in 1991 and received an American Book Award in 1992. Gilyard looks at studies in Black English, bidialectalism, and code-switching in light of his own experience. Another influential literacy narrative was Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color (1993). At this time, an interest in the literacy stories of students began to infuse classroom practices as well (see Patthey-Chavez and Gergen; Lu, “Conflict”).
The
