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WEEK 3

Issues of Student Access: Who is Included?

A major theme of this weeks readings was that of student access. Harris1

addresses

access through error, community, contact and negotiation. Crowley2 discusses access in terms of

cultural ideology, critiquing the idea of education and literacy as cultural capital. Berlin3

echoes

access in terms of the socioeconomic and the cultural, but he also explores the affects of different

rhetorical theories on students writing abilities. All of these readings, to some extent, question

past and current articulations of student inclusion: Who is included and excluded from the

university? Who can succeed in Freshman English? Who has access to the meritocracy?

Harris addresses issues of access throughoutA Teaching Subject, but for space, Im in

interested in what he has to say about access in Error. Even though he juxtaposes scholars with

very different viewpoints (Shaughnessy vs. Smitherman), the thread that ties them is access and

ensuring that teachers give students a chance to succeed. Shaughnessys main argument is

described as one ofinclusionthat we can (and should) teach a kind of student, the basic

writer, who has too often slipped beneath the notice of the professoriate (Harris 80). Likewise,

Smithermans notions of language education, that all students have a right to their own language,

advocates inclusion. Harris takes both ideas further when he states, We thus need to recognize

there are other Englishes, tied to other contexts or communities, which are not simply

underdeveloped or less public versions of academic discourse, but that work toward different

1 Harris, Joseph.A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Upper Saddle River, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1997.

2 Crowley, Sharon. A Personal Essay on Freshman English.Composition in the University:Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. 228-49.

3 Berlin, James.Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985.

Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP: 1987. 1-57.

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2ends and whose use may express a competing or oppositional politics (89). Though they may

have butted heads on critical issues, I think both Shaughnessy and Smitherman could appreciate

the common ground here: Basic writers need to be included because even though their voices are

different, they are still valuable; likewise, all studentsregardless of race or class, have a voice

that is valuable to the classroom conversation.

Crowley, though extreme in her recommendations for Freshman English, also raises

important points about the deep-rooted cultural and academic expectations (Crowley 229) of

access and who deserves access to higher education. She situates her argument in terms of

cultural capital, lecturing on a broken system that originated as punishment for those students

who failed to master a highly idealized version of the written dialect of a dominant class (231).

Crowley sees teachers as advocates, as the people who need to push against those dominant

ideologies in order to provide all students with access to literacysomething that is absolutely

necessary if students are to move between different discourse communities (233).

Harris and Crowleys accounts point toward student access in the university, arguing that

class and culture are huge factors in the way students are both admitted and treated within

academic environments. Berlin discusses this, tooparticularly when discussing the rhetoric of

the meritocracy and elitist and aristocraticrhetorics (Berlin 35). He also addresses students

own abilities to access the academy through writing and uncovering truth. Berlin covers three

rhetorical theories: objective, subjective, and transactional. For objective theories, truth is found

in nature, and language must be the objective translator of that truth (8); subjective theories value

the individual, promoting the idea that truth is within the individual and that the articulation of

that truth, though it will never be quite as great, is the responsibility of the student (11); then,

transactional rhetorics view truth as the intersections of all elements of the rhetorical situation

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3(15). What I find interesting about these different theories is the extremely different ways they

position students and student power within the classroom. The student goes from an almost

insignificant part of the writing process (Write in a clear, impersonal manner and do it well.) to

the entirety of the writing process (Think about what you want to say and how you can say it,

nurture that idea, and write.). However, I find it troubling that these theories seem to suggest

that we are now settling into progressive rhetorics.

Throughout these historical readings, it is easy to see the troubles of the past and think

that composition is now beyond those issues. We are past current-traditional where students

were prescriptively instructed; we are past racist and classist classroom practices. I see this not

as an issue of advancement, but one that ignores problems and labels them as past, so when

those issues still arise within the classroom, they are anomalous. I know many composition

teachers who teach grammar, who teach very particular forms, and I have also known teachers

who grade ESL and first-generation college students unfairly based on correct English

standards. So where does that leave composition? Is it abolishing the universal requirement of

Freshman English that Crowley suggests? How much would that actuallysolve? Imagining the

classroom as a public discourse and writing as training for participation in the democratic

process (Harris 35) certainly seems like a good start for addressing these sticky issues that

remain in composition classrooms.